By Grace Minter
Braille Literacy Teacher at the Governor Morehead School for the Blind
Learning to read braille is an exhilarating and empowering experience, but at times, it can also be a frustrating one. The task of learning to read in a wholly different way than you’re used to can hardly be called easy. Though it isn’t without its challenges, it is a worthwhile and transformative endeavor that will open countless new doors of opportunity, independence, and joy for those who persevere through the bumps in the road.
At first, reading may feel like the incredibly laborious process of slogging through mud. You may have to work through sentences letter by letter and word by word. By the end, you may not even remember the words. You may track a paragraph’s worth of lines and only be able to recognize a handful of letters. You may find it impossible to track in a straight line or struggle to find the next one and get lost every 30 seconds as a result. You may confuse similar characters and struggle to distinguish between regular and low symbols. You may keep forgetting contractions and have to stop to look them up every other minute. You may have to reread the same sentence or paragraph multiple times to gain a solid grasp of the information. You may think back to a time before vision loss when you could read print with ease and be tempted to throw your hands up in exasperated surrender. But do not lose heart. You are not alone. Each and every one of these difficulties are part of the learning process and common to emerging braille readers. They can be conquered. Though there is sadly no magical solution such as a mysterious serum to apply to your fingers to make tactile discrimination an instant breeze or a brain implant to give you instantaneously perfect knowledge of every symbol, there are strategies that can make all the difference with commitment and effortfulness. At the most basic level, the key to effective braille reading is found in a few simple habits known as reading mechanics.
Environment Recommendations
- Choose a space free of external distractions: away from conversing people, machinery, technology, pets, music, and generally the noisy commotion of daily life. And for goodness sake, turn off that darned TV so you can give 100% of your attention to the task at hand!
- Prepare a space with a table/desk and chair free of clutter.
- Select a chair height that allows elbows to rest on the table as close to a 90 degree angle as possible.
- Choose a chair that won’t slide or roll around under you as you move over the page.
- If the surface of the desk or table is at all slippery, place the reading material on a non-slide pad such as a mouse pad, placemat, or a piece of shelf-paper cut to fit. This will work to prevent the braille page from slipping around under your fingers while you’re trying to read it.
- If you have residual vision that causes you to find yourself trying to use your eyes to identify the dots rather than utilizing your tactile discrimination skills, consider wearing a sleep mask to eliminate this temptation. Honor the braille medium by reading it the way it was intended to be read. Developing strong tactile discrimination is crucial for emergent braille learners. If you neglect that skill in favor of vision, you won’t have it in place when you can no longer rely on that vision, requiring tons of frustrating relearning that would have otherwise been unnecessary.
- For those with light sensitivity, and to create a more relaxed, peaceful atmosphere, turn off the lights in the room.
Body Positioning
- Proper posture is absolutely vital to developing healthy reading habits. Sit up straight and tall. Slouching actually makes tracking braille much harder.
- Hold your head up normally, don’t let your chin droop down to rest on your chest.
- Place your feet flat on the ground in front of you.
- Keep your elbows in towards your sides. No chicken wings please!
- Hold your arms out in front of you so they make as close to a 90-degree angle over the page as possible.
- Let your muscles stay loose, don’t let your arms, wrists, or hands be stiff.
- Take a few deep breaths, let the tension go, and relax!
Finger Placement
- The optimal part of the finger for braille reading is a very small, precise area between the pad and the tip. To find it, lay your hands flat on the page. The part of your fingers that just barely misses touching the paper is the reading zone best able to decern tiny details such as the shapes of braille cells.
- Many beginning readers tend to stick out their index fingers and tuck all the other fingers into a fist. This is a notoriously horrid habit! Even if you primarily decode with your index fingers, you need your other reading fingers for tracking in a straight line and sensing when the end of the line is coming up. Many proficient braille readers decode with multiple fingers, a more effective practice than making your index fingers do all the work alone; so unclench those fists! Typically, there are three reading fingers: the index, middle, and ring fingers from both hands. That’s a total of 6 fingers that should be down on that page. It is also beneficial to include your pinky’s as they are handy when it comes to announcing the end of a line and keeping a reader from straying off the straight line to one above or below. All these fingers play a role in providing a sense of where you are on the page and work together to bring awareness of the content. The thumbs should be the only ones left out of the process.
- Keeping your arms and wrists off the page, hold your hands parallel to it while placing your three reading fingers from both hands gently on the first line. Only the hot spots of each finger should be touching. Your wrists should be straight, not floppy.
Hand Movement
- Unlike print, braille character perception requires movement to take place. In other words, we can only really sense the details of what we touch when moving over them. We get very little information from staying still.
- Tracking is a term that refers to the technique of scanning through braille text with the fingers to perceive characters, words, lines, and paragraphs. Beginning braille learners should track with their two hands together until their confidence grows. The two hands move simultaneously from the left of the line to the right, then back to the start before dropping down to the next line.
- Never drop down to the next line at the end of the current one. Always go back to the beginning of a line beforedropping down! What if the line under the current one is shorter? You’ll miss it entirely or get yourself lost looking for the next section.
- More advanced readers use a tracking pattern called the scissors or butterfly technique. This involves tracking with both hands to the middle of the line. Then, while the left hand goes back to the start and drops to find the start of the next line, the right is finishing the current line. When the right finishes the line, it simply jumps to join the left and the process starts again. This saves the reader considerable time looking for the start of the next line and makes reading into a more fluid movement.
- Some readers prefer to use only one hand or the other. Of course, in some cases, this may be necessary due to medical conditions. And for those who fall into this category, know that it is quite within reach to be very successful with this method. Helen Keller herself was a one-handed reader. However, I strongly recommend using both hands if at all possible. Not only does it allow for the use of a swifter, smoother tracking pattern, but it makes staying on the line easier, and provides a greater amount of information about page and text content. I also find it to be less tiring, allowing longer reading endurance, as both hands are contributing evenly, rather than one having to exert all the energy.
- As tactile discrimination is in the early stages of being developed, many beginners fall into the terrible habit of stopping the fluid, left to right movement of their fingers to feel a character by moving their finger up and down over it. This is problematic for two reasons: 1) it interrupts the smooth left to right hand movement which hinders accurate character perception and slows down the whole process considerably. 2) it can be very damaging to the embossed braille itself as it presses down on the dots making them less discernable for future readers. This bad habit is known as “scrubbing” and is to be avoided at all costs. It is okay if you need to stop and “refeel” something occasionally. But always go back and feel again from left to right, not up and down. If you find you need to do this often, it is an indication that the material is too advanced for you at present. At this point, it is best to lower the complexity or reading level of the material to give yourself a chance to strengthen your tactile discrimination.
Tactile Discrimination Building Exercises
- Track lines containing full cells with varying numbers of spaces hiding in each line. Use the both hands together technique and count how many spaces you encounter on a line. Don’t stop to examine closely or go back. Focus on smooth, steady, unbreaking tracking using all three reading fingers from both hands (index, middle, and ring fingers).
- Track lines containing different arrangements of spaced apart l’s (longs), b’s or c’s (shorts), and g or full cells (fats). Without stopping to scrub on, call out each shape you feel as your fingers gently pass over it from left to right.
- Identify the letter that does not match within a set of three to five in double-spaced lines.
- Hunt for a specific given letter hidden within a line or page of letters.
- Track over lines containing three or four words and quickly recognize the word that is different from the others.
- Track double spaced lines of continuous, repeated characters without spaces. One cell or a group of adjacent cells will contain a different shape than the rest of the line. Identify the break in the pattern. Focus on posture, finger positioning, hand movement, and maintaining a consistent tracking rate. Try to minimize the amount of rereading or stopping to examine a part of the line.
Reading Fluency Building Exercises
Repeated Reading
Braille out a simple sentence such as “I like dogs a lot, but I do not like cats at all.” Read it over and over again focusing on posture, finger mechanics, and smooth tracking. First, track the sentence at a steady pace without worrying about identifying letters or words. Repeatedly track at the same pace until you find yourself noticing specific letters here and there (without having to slow down). Soon you’ll be recognizing whole words. The key is to focus on smooth, steady tracking. Resist the temptation to slow down, stop, or go back to “get” a certain letter or word. It is vital to stop thinking of letters as combinations of the six dots by number name and start instead just thinking of them by shape. The number names are useful for beginning learners but now that you are a tactile reader, put those numbers in the back of your head and focus only on the shapes and patterns you perceive.
How Far Can I get?
Start at the beginning of a page, chapter, or article. Set a timer and go. Record how far in the text you were able to get before the timer dinged, then do it over again. You can do it by number of words or simply by marking your place and trying to get past it the next read through.
Don’t Start Too Big
Read shorter materials with a relatively easy vocabulary at first that let you focus on reading mechanics rather than comprehension. The text of a picture book, well-known short story, poem, jokes, riddles, simple set of instructions, or lyrics of a familiar song are good options. Once you gain confidence with these tasks, gradually introduce longer material such as chapter books, news articles, technology manuals, etc. It’s easy for us to overestimate ourselves when we’re excited about acquiring a new skill. In order to experience success, be realistic about where you are in your braille fluency journey. Set realistic goals for yourself and advance incrementally when you truly feel ready. No one plays for Carnegie Hall before mastering the C scale.
Read a Variety of Different Text Types
There is so much content out there to be read and enjoyed: short stories, novels, poems, recipes, song lyrics, instruction manuals, mathematics, scientific journals, news articles, music, joke books, emails, letters … the list goes on and on. Don’t limit yourself to a single category. Just as it is for print readers, reading widely is a mark of a strong braille reader. Additionally, consuming diverse materials ensures familiarity with a more complete range of punctuation symbols and formatting. This is particularly vital for students pursuing higher-level education or those with careers involving a substantial amount of reading or writing.
Track Your Growth
Collect data other tangible evidence of your own progress. Our own progress can be difficult to perceive as we tend to focus on our difficiencies. We compare ourselves to others or focus on how far we still have to go to reach our goal. To combat this unproductive tendency, start a spreadsheet or word document to track your reading experiences. Time yourself on a familiar passage and keep a record of your reading rates. Record a new data every week and month. Additionally, record positive thoughts about how you’re doing along your braille journey. Save all your completed reading material in a drawer or bin to look back at when you start to doubt yourself. Intentionally taking note of your successes will increase motivation and provide reassurance that you’re moving in the right direction when things get tough.
Conclusion
Key to preventing dissatisfaction with your own braille reading progress is realizing that, for most, braille fluency is one of life’s mysterious processes that is made evident, not day by day, but year by year. Like the child who eagerly measures his height every morning in anticipation of meeting the height requirement for a first roller coaster ride, we start our braille journey with great zest and purposefulness. But like the child stomping his feet after realizing he won’t be tall enough by next Saturday’s birthday party, that initial drive can dissolve as we settle down to the daily grind of training our brain and body to absorb information through this new channel. Demanding growth from yourself in days leads only to frustration and eventually, stagnation; but give yourself time and one day, like the child who has grown into a strapping 6 foot tall teenager, you too will see just how far you’ve come.
