I was doing well in the uncontracted braille course and was barreling forward because I wanted to get to the more interesting contracted braille in which I’d learn shortcuts and ultimately be able to read braille wherever I found it. Knowing the alphabet, numbers, punctuation and associated rules was the totally of the first course, but things as simple as the ‘Men’ and ‘Women’ signs on bathrooms have contractions in them. In the case of the bathroom signs, since I already knew what the word was, it was fairly easy to figure out, but to realistically read braille, I need to know it all.
Here’s an example. In uncontracted braille the sentence: ‘You should receive your letter tomorrow afternoon.” looks like this:
It’s almost a 1-for-1 character translation with the only extra character being the first, which is the capital indicator.
But braille is long and takes up space. You can’t reduce the type font because a blind person reads with their fingers and those little dots are already pretty small. I’ve tried to even discern a few characters with my fingers and it’s hard. Braille books are significantly larger than print books and so to reduce the overall space, contracted braille was born.
As my mother-in-law has told me, it’s not unlike shorthand with lots of shortcuts for words. The same sentence above looks like this in contracted braille:
The capital indicator is at the beginning and the period is the last symbol. You can tell there are seven words in the sentence from the spaces, but it’s not at all like the uncontracted spell-everything-out-letter-by-letter version.
There are a lot of contractions. Some are stand-alone words and some are letter combinations that can be at the start of a word, but not in the middle or end. Others can be found anywhere in the word. It’s a little daunting, to say the least.
Today I caught up with my class homework and decided to do some practice work. I took the my contraction reference sheets upstairs to my daughter’s brailler which is seated at a child-sized desk. I moved it to an adult-sized table and started typing. I typed for over an hour. I used sheets and sheets of braille paper.
And several things happened: first, I got more proficient at typing. I was having to think less and less about what finger/key combinations each letter was. Second, I started to remember some of the contractions I was either forgetting entirely or getting confused with other contractions. I also started to remember what contractions there were. For example, there’s a contraction for ‘it’ and ‘as’, but not ‘is’.
Tomorrow, Florence weather permitting, we’re going to lunch with my daughter’s braillest from last year. I’m looking forward to hearing tips she has on how to keep all the contractions straight. The last time we had lunch she had some very helpful advice.
The Big Boy Update: We were out to dinner with Uncle Jonathan and Margaret the other night in a restaurant that had televisions showing football on them. Anything on a screen my son is drawn to. We don’t watch much television at home and never have football on. As he was watching he saw a pass and said, sounding impressed, “he threw that football far. Then the picture cut to the announcers. My son turned to me and asked, “Is that the guy from Cosmos?” I looked and the black man did look a little bit like Neil deGrasse Tyson. I think my son was disappointed. Cosmos is his favorite show.
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: My daughter wanted to do some team braille writing this afternoon to help me with my braille, she said. We ended up writing letters to her brother and father. We’d each write a few sentences on a page, I would interline or write the print version of what we’d typed above the braille and she’d add a picture. We put the letters in envelopes and gave them to my son and husband at dinner. We worked on accuracy of our typing—she and I both rush and make a lot of mistakes. Braille mistakes are erasable, but it’s not as easy as backspacing on a computer. You have to press the raised dots back into the paper with a small wooden tool. Or, if you’re my daughter, you just use your fingernail.
When I Was Young: My father sent me an email today with a picture of me with the subject line of ‘Cute baby’.
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