Sight Reading Braille

My daughter is doing very well with braille in some ways.   This afternoon she wanted to work on the new brailler they sent home from school.   She can type her name surprisingly fast, which is interesting to see because a brailler doesn’t work like a regular typewriter does.

There are six dots in a braille “cell” in an arrangement of two columns of three dots each.   To type a letter or symbol you press the keys associated with the dots you want at the same time.   The dots are numbered one through six in an order you have to get used to because it’s not left to right but instead is 3,2,1 <space key> 4, 5, 6.   Once you understand how those numbers “swing” or translate from a straight line into the rectangular shape of the “cell” it makes a lot of sense, but it takes a while to get your mind around that translation not unlike what you have to do when reading music notes and matching that to keys on a piano.

Watching someone type on a brailler is a lot like what it looks like to my untrained eye when someone is using a shorthand typewriter—in other words, foreign.  This is mostly because instead of pressing one key at a time like you do on a traditional keyboard, you press a combination of keys at the same time.  And yet my daughter can type her name and other things very quickly.   She can also tell you things like, ‘r’ is 1,2,3,5 and what to do to indicate a capital letter or a number.   And she can verify if what she’s typed is indeed what she was aiming for.   But she can’t read braille well yet.

And I don’t have any complaints because I can’t either.   I’ve been told it’s quite challenging to learn to effectively read braille as an adult with any speed or proficiency.   I was thinking I was getting fairly good at reading braille until I had a realization the other day.   Yes, I can read the dots and with a little cheat chart I keep in our living room I can figure out what each letter is.  I even know a few of the letters without having to refer to the chart.    But I’ve been cheating.

I’m cheating because I’m not “reading” the braille, I’m “seeing” the braille.   I’m looking at the piece of paper and using my eyes I can see what the dot combinations are and I’m mapping that to the corresponding letters.    Using my fingers to truly read the braille is another thing altogether.   Today on the way home from school my daughter was handing me flash cards with letters, seeing if I could tell what the letter was, admonishing me to not look, only to feel.   I took the card into my lap and tried to discern with my fingers alone which dots were on the card.   And I was failing.

I got a good bit of them, asking her, “what letter is 1,2,3?”  But there were times I couldn’t even tell how many dots were there.   I’d hand the card back, asking her if there were two or three dots on the card and that I thought there were only two.   She’d laugh and tell me no, there were three and then be happy she knew something I didn’t know.

Reading braille is a lot harder than seeing braille.

The Big Boy Update:  It has been established that my son is, not unlike other children his age, obsessed with Minecraft.   In that vein, this past weekend while the children were at Nana and Papa’s we got a text from Nana saying, “your son is too much.   He wants me to tell him how the very first cow was spawned.  Where does he get these ideas?”

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter has not only accepted that eye drops happen a lot, she’s even gotten interested in making sure they happen.   She has her own knock knock joke about it.   She’s done this for almost a week now.   She’ll say, “knock knock” to which I answer, “who’s there?”   She’ll say, “eyeballs”.   Then I ask, “eyeballs who?” and then she laughs and says, “we forgot to do eyedrops!”