Carrie Gillon: Hi, and welcome to the Vocal Fries Podcast, the podcast about linguistic discrimination.
Megan Figueroa: I’m Megan Figueroa.
Carrie: And I’m Carrie Gillon.
Megan: We have an awesome episode today. I just want to say straight off the bat because I learned, I think everything that our guest said was new to me.
Carrie: Yeah. I’ve never really thought to study braille. I always thought it was an interesting system, but I never looked at it that hard. And yeah, I learned a lot.
Megan: I love that. I always learn a lot from our guests, but my goodness. So yeah, I just want to say that straight off the bat, such a good interview.
Carrie: We should remind people, and we have Patreon, http://www.patreon.com/vocalfriespod, which is helping us pay for our editor, which is helping me greatly. And I think the last two episodes were edited by him, but this last one, for some reason, I was just extra impressed. But anyway, I just wanted to point that out because I’m very grateful that he’s done such a great job. Oh, yeah. Also, the transcripts, but that’s been the case for a while.
Megan: Yeah. But we just recorded our bonus for June, and they’re fun. Like you have access to so many if you decide to become a Patreon.
Carrie: And that reminds me, there’s actually now a seven-day trial that you can… Yeah.
Megan: What? That’s really cool.
Carrie: Yeah. So go ahead and try that out, and hopefully, you stick around, and if you don’t, we understand. So this is in the conversation. Linguists have identified a new English dialect that’s emerging in South Florida.
Megan: Oh, my goodness. Okay.
Carrie: Okay. So, here’s some examples from the article. It’s written by Philip M. Carter.
Megan: Oh, Philip Carter. Yeah. We should have him on the show.
Carrie: ”We got down from the car and went inside,” ”I made the line to pay for groceries.” ”He made a party to celebrate his son’s birthday.”
Megan: Ooh. You know what I’m hearing in those Spanish?
Carrie: Mm-hmm. It definitely sounds romance to me.
Megan: Okay. Yeah.
Carrie: But it’s certainly from Spanish, not any other of the romance languages, but…
Megan: Right.
Carrie: Yeah. So those are some interesting expressions. And so, according to Philip Carter, there’s a new dialect taking shape in South Florida.
Megan: He made a party for, and then I got down from the car. So getting out of a car. It reminds me of the Chicano English.
Carrie: Right. So it’s like just importing the Spanish verb you would have used in Spanish into English and using the English equivalent. So, yeah. So this slang variety does come about through sustained contact between Spanish and English, and there’s definitely some direct translation from Spanish into English in this variety. So this happens also in other contact situations. Obviously, English is borrowed words all the time, right, from other languages. And usually, this happens because you have bilingual facilities, so you can use both languages. Some, so not always, but so often, that’s how it happens. But when you have contact, you’ll get influence from another language onto another. So English has been heavily influenced by Norman French, a really old version of French, right?
Megan: At a very specific time of history because of what was going on.
Carrie: Yeah. Like a thousand years ago, basically. So 10,000 words came from that variety of French into English.
Megan: I didn’t realize that it was that many.
Carrie: Yeah, it’s a lot.
Megan: What’s an example? Does it have an example of one?
Carrie: Prince, government.
Megan: Isn’t it all of our words for meats?
Carrie: Yes. So yeah, the fact that we have two words for the meat versus the animal is, as far as I know, unique, if not unique, very unusual in the words languages. And that’s the ab- That’s because we borrowed the French word for cooking, and we kept the original Anglo sax and [inaudible] word for the animal. Okay. So prince, government, administer, liberty, court, prayer, judge, justice, literature, music, poetry.
Megan: Oh, wow!
Carrie: So this has happened for two English before where, like you say, whole sets of words have just been imported into the language from another language. So it’s like, just what happens, especially in a language like English, which is in contact with other languages, has been in contact with other languages, sustained ways over different languages. Sustained amounts of time in different eras. And now, more than 65% of the population of Miami-Dade County identified as Hispanic or Latinx. And then in some municipalities, it goes up to 80 to 95%. So in some parts, it’s quite, quite high.
Megan: Yeah. Because when I went to Miami, which was literally only for 24 hours, the amount of Spanish I heard, I was surprised. And I live in Tucson, where there’s Spanish everywhere. And if they weren’t speaking Spanish, I could hear that they were Spanish speakers, right, in their accent. I also wonder this is so different than Chicano English, because Chicano English is something that a lot of people speak without being a Spanish speaker. So I wonder if this is going to ever be a… I would guess it’s not a thing right now where a lot of people don’t speak Spanish. They just got these features from people that do. I don’t think that that’s probably the case right now, right? It might be in the future, but…
Carrie: Yeah. So Chicano English probably came from a similar situation, right, where most of the people were Spanish speakers, but that’s not true anymore. And then this situation is like in an older, or a more early stage where it is Spanish speakers. So yeah. It is definitely, in both cases, the influence of Spanish, at least at the beginning of the creation of the variety.
Megan: Right.
Carrie: Miami is a different situation because a lot of the speakers are from Cuba rather than from St. Mexico or Central America. We already have a bunch of calcs, which is when we import something directly from a language.
Megan: And keep the sound, right?
Carrie: Calc could be you take the exact meaning and translate it into your language.
Megan: Okay. So it’s not taking.
Carrie: So, let’s say [foreign words] is a calc from English; let the good times roll.
Megan: Okay. Got it.
Carrie: So there’s many, many calcs in this variety. It’s Miami variety of English. So get down from the car instead of get out of the car. Is because they’re just straight out borrowing the way you would say it in Spanish, or married with because in Spanish, that’s how you would say it. Here’s another type of calc. This is a semantic calc where you’re taking the meaning of the word, in this case in Spanish, where it has certain meanings, but in English, it has a narrower meaning, but now you’re using the more broad meaning. So carne can both refer to meat, all meat, or just to beef. But in English, meat means any meat. You would never use meat. Well, outside of this variety, you would never use meat to specifically refer to beef. But in this variety, you can. Say, I’ll have one meat empanada and two chicken empanadas, and they would understand you to mean one beef and two chicken.
Megan: That’s amazing.
Carrie: Yeah. So, that’s interesting. And then there are phonetic calcs where you translate certain sounds. Thanks God is a common saying in Miami.
Megan: I love it.
Carrie: Because gracias has an S at the end, so you’re like, okay, I’m going to put an S at the end of the English as well. Even though it’s not that it doesn’t make sense, I guess, it’s just not how it is said in other varieties of English.
Megan: I love it. This is amazing.
Carrie: Some of these things are only used in people who actually immigrated as adults. So things like throw a photo instead of take a photo is not used by American-born users of this variety. So in, those who are Miami born, they may be bilingual, but they may not be, although they probably are just given the situation in Miami. English is probably still their primary language, or at least for some of them, it is. Even for them, they will use married with.
Megan: Ah, the ones that were born in Miami? They would’ve gone to school in Miami, so that’s going to be in English. That’s, I think, a big difference, right? Because if they’re new immigrants from Cuba, they would’ve had schooling in Spanish.
Carrie: Yeah. So there’s a divide in terms of how much of these calcs they use, depending on if they’re born and raised in Miami versus moved there later.
Megan: Right. I love it.
Carrie: Yeah. It’s cool to watch a new dialect to be born, sort of.
Megan: Yeah. Absolutely. Oh, I love language.
Carrie: Yeah, me too.
Megan: We’re such dorks.
Carrie: No, we’re such not. We are red stars[?]. We are such dorks. But let’s now be dorks about braille.
Megan: Yes.
Carrie: Okay. So today, we’re very excited to have Dr. Robert Englebretson, who is an associate professor of Linguistics at Rice University, where he teaches courses in Linguistic Analysis, Discourse and Grammar, Field Methods, and Research on Braille. His academic career began with fieldwork in Indonesia, a book and several articles on colloquial Indonesian grammar and discourse, and research on stance-taking and conversational interaction. Englebretson is a lifelong braille reader, and his focus on braille research began in 2006 when he was appointed to the international council on English Braille’s Committee on Linguistics and Foreign Languages. In this role, he revised and published a braille version of the international phonetic alphabet to empower better access to phonetics for blind and visually impaired people working in language-related fields. In November 2019, the Braille Authority of North America recognized Englebretson with the Darleen Bogart Braille Excellence Award for this work. His current work seeks to bring braille research squarely into the mainstream of the reading sciences and to contribute to evidence-based approaches to improving braille literacy. So welcome.
Robert Englebretson: Thank you. It’s really great to be here. I’m big fans of your show, and I’m honored to be on it.
Carrie: Oh, thank you. Yeah. You’ve listened to our show, so you’re getting a behind-the-scenes thing, and we just had a little goof here. You had to do the intro because Megan said Robert as Rongel, something like that.
Megan: Well, I don’t even know. There were just a lot of sounds in my head.
Robert: It definitely was a name that I had not heard before. What I heard was Rogel.
Carrie: Same.
Robert: And I think it was a blend of part of my first name and part of my last name.
Megan: I was definitely obsessing up your last name, and then it just came into your first name, and I got the giggles a bit, so Carrie had to do it.
Robert: That’s why I have the… The students always call me Dr. E just because they don’t want to mess with that name, either. So you guys, just call me Robert or Rogel if you really must.
Carrie: It’s a new nickname that ties into our previous episode.
Megan: Yes, exactly. Oh, my goodness. Yeah. So really excited to have you on today. This is, I think, such an important topic that I just want to start with just like basically, the beginning of what is Braille?
Robert: Yeah. Well, let me back up just a little bit from that and just say I always start… Whenever I talk about braille, I always want to make the point that literacy is a basic human right. And so whether we’re talking about literacy for sighted people, which seems to be the default when people talk about literacy, or braille literacy for blind people, it’s a basic human right. So that’s where I’m starting from in my work on braille and in this talk, just understanding that literacy is a basic human right, and that’s true just as much for blind people as it is for people who are cited. Whoa! We just had a thunderclap here. I don’t know if you can hear that [inaudible].
Carrie: Oh wow, that’s so loud.
Megan: Oh, wow. Holy.
Robert: This is one of the downfalls of trying to record something in Houston in the summertime as you get thunderstorms.
Carrie: Same in Phoenix and Tucson, but oh my goodness, that was the loudest I think I’ve heard.
Megan: And long.
Robert: Yeah, it rolls. So I wonder, hopefully, we won’t be interrupted too much by that. So Braille is basically a writing system that enables blind and visually impaired people to read and write. Braille is based on a cell that is three dots high and two dots wide. So every braille character is based in six dots, and there are braille systems for English for about 135 of the world’s languages. There’s braille systems for mathematics and musical notation and, of course, the IPA, as you all mentioned in the intro. And hobbies like knitting and crocheting and other things like that. So basically, anything that cited people can do with print pretty much you can do with braille as well.
Carrie: That’s so cool.
Megan: I know that’s relevant to both Carrie just the fiber arts.
Robert: Ah, yeah, there was something about sweater knitting in the last episode that I remember, right?
Carrie: Yes, that was my dad. I mean, I also knit, but yeah, he’s the one who has all the… He used to have this whole series of baby-sized hockey jerseys of all the teams that have ever existed. So really obscure ones that most people wouldn’t have heard of. The Whalers, which everyone has, but also…
Megan: He knitted them?
Carrie: Mm-hmm.
Megan: Wow.
Carrie: That’s quite the art project. But anyway, back to braille.
Robert: Back to braille. Yeah. So historically, it’s interesting. I don’t think most people know how contested the nature of braille was, especially in its early days. I don’t want to get too much into the weeds on the history, although we could talk for hours about that. But essentially, braille is named after Louis Braille, who was born in 1809 in France. And around that time in Europe, in France specifically, there was a guy named Valentin Haüy. I probably am mispronouncing the French horribly, but he started the first school for the blind, and it was in Paris in 1785. And what was used for reading at that point was essentially books with large embossed print characters, okay? So they large, you traced them with your fingers, but it was pretty radical even then to the idea that blind people would be educated and would learn to read, okay? So around 1815, there was a person named Charles Barbier who invented a tactile writing system that… There’s been a lot of work recently looking at archives of letters and of Louis Braille’s letters and of Charles Barbie’s letters, and all of these letters from the time.
And we find that there has been a lot of hagiography and urban myths, and you can think of it like the great Eskimo snow hoax in linguistics. But a lot of things about the life of Louis Braille, about how things happened, are being revised a little bit in the light of what we now know from the letters and from the archives. So this gentleman named Charles Barbier was interested in writing systems more generally, and he invented this tactile writing system that he specifically intended for use by blind people. It was a series… Well, there were two systems that he invented, but it was essentially a matrix of dots, and the position of the dot in the matrix would determine what sound it was. It was phonetically based also.
Megan: Was he blind himself?
Robert: He was not blind, nor were the people who ran the schools and who were promoting. None of those were blind. So in 1821, and this is to me where it gets really cool, the then director of the school for the blind in Paris introduced his students to Charles Barbie’s system and said, I’ve had it, basically, make this work. And so Louis Braille and his schoolmates took this system of a matrix of dots where a dot in a particular part of the matrix represented a sound and reduced it to this what I just described as the braille cell. This character of six dots that was small enough to fit under the finger pad now and that you basically could read really quickly bilaterally, moving your hands across the page. They also modified the frame and punch that Charles Barbier had invented so that blind students could write themselves. And prior to that, there was no way for blind people to write. You’d have to have someone write for you. And certainly, writing the embossed print wasn’t workable. You that involved a lot of pouring wax and using dyes, and it was a very intensive process that really wouldn’t work for taking your own notes or passing notes under the desk to your friends in the classroom or whatever people did with them. So it was innovative first of all that, what we now call the braille system was developed by Louis Braille and his schoolmates by blind people and four blind people. And essentially made it possible for the first time for blind people to both read and write. And it was a revolution in that sense, and it really took off among the students at the school.
Now, unfortunately, around that same time, so the then director of the school resigned or left or died or retired. I can’t remember exactly what happened, and his predecessor was not a fan of this new system. So it was not encouraged, shall we say. And this also, around the same time, is what was happening in the United States. So a gentleman named Samuel Gridley Howe, who may have heard of, he was a physician, and he was interested in starting a school for the blind in Boston, which he did. And his method of writing was also a raised print system which became known as Boston Line type. And there were other raised print systems in existence in the 19th century in America. So Philadelphia Line type and a couple others. Essentially, the braille system eventually took off around Europe, and in the 1870s, it was widely adopted across Europe and in Britain as well. But it took a long time after that for it to catch on in the United States because the cited directors of the schools for the blind, the arguments that they made were essentially, at some level, what we could now think of as universal design, right? We want a system that everyone can use that’s universally usable by both blind and cited people. I mean, never mind that cited, people are not going to be using these enormous embossed raised letters, but I think the underlying concern was if you have a separate writing system for people who are blind, it’s going to cause segregation and all of that. But what they failed to take into account, which they didn’t really know then, of course, was the way that the human visual system and human tactile system are different, right?
So the affordances of the human visual system are for recognizing things like lines and curves, which is what we find in most print writing systems. A lot of lines and a lot of curves. But for the tactile system, the affordances of the tactile system are more dots and texture. So texture patterns and the braille system really was much better suited for how the tactile system works.
Megan: So if you’re following what is called the sighted norm… If you’re following the sighted norm because you’re someone who can see, so you’re trying to create this system.
Robert: I’m not.
Megan: Right. These people Samuel Gridley Howe, who I’m assuming was not blind.
Robert: Pretty much all of the heads of the schools for the blind in the 19th century were cited, people.
Megan: Right. So even if you have good intentions, right, you still do not have those lived experiences to know that. Like, you’re putting your finger over embossed letters, and you can see, you’re seeing what you’re putting your finger on, right? And so they just can’t imagine beyond that. They’re like, well, this works. And I’m wondering, this embossing of letters, just for getting a sense, how high off the page would this have been? Not much, right?
Robert: Yeah, they were pretty low on the page. And there’s a couple of really interesting museums where you can go see this stuff. So if anybody happens to be in Louisville, Kentucky, that’s where the American Printing House for the Blind is, and there’s the Museum of the American Printing House for the Blind, which has… I just spent hours there one day I was visiting just going through the exhibits. They have examples of Boston Line Type of the various line types, contrasting them and comparing them with braille and other systems that were in use. My point here isn’t to so much get into the weeds about that is to. Say it wasn’t until 1916 that the schools for the blind in the United States adopted braille as the writing system. There were competing systems; there were all these line systems. There was a competing point system called New York Point that was invented by a cited school superintendent in New York. That’s why it was called New York Point, which was competing with braille. And there was a lot of animosity between these various systems, which became known as The War of the Dots. And eventually, this was resolved in favor of braille in 1916, and it was standardized in the 30s, and at that point, it was kind of brought more into line with the braille system that had been used all this time in Britain. It’s a very contested history, and I don’t think most people realize, yeah, The War of the Dots. It’s an interesting time period in blindness history. But I don’t think most people realized that braille wasn’t really widely adopted until the early part of the 20th century, barely over 100 years ago in the United States.
Carrie: Yeah, I had no idea. I was going to ask what other competing systems were there because I had no idea. I’ve only ever heard of braille. Were there any others besides the point and the line systems?
Robert: Well, sure, there was the raise line systems that we briefly talked about, and then there was a system called New York Point, which I don’t need to go into the details of how it differs, but it was also a point writing system but really was only used in part of the United States. So what you had in the early 20th century, so if you think of someone like Helen Keller, who actually was a real person, I know there was some weird TikTok stuff going around a couple years ago saying that Helen Keller is not real and she was very much real. Yeah, it’s one of those very interesting conspiracy theories.
Carrie: TikTok is a weird space for that.
Robert: It is a weird space, that’s for sure.
Carrie: I mean, I love it, but the conspiracies that come out of it are just bizarre, but anyway…
Robert: But Helen Keller, for example, read all of these systems. If you were a blind person in the early 20th century, you had to read braille. Well, no, you didn’t have to read braille. You may have read both braille and New York Point and probably one of the raised line systems as well.
Megan: Is New York Point also where it fits under the pad of your finger?
Robert: It does fit under the pad of the finger. The configurations of dots are very different. So the New York point cell was two dots high rather than the braille three, and it was variable width. So theoretically, in terms of information theory, you could fit a lot more on a line than with braille. It was a lot more compact, but braille went out for good reasons.
Megan: I guess it’s just the crafty person in me because I know what embossing… Embossing is really like anyone can do it now if you go to your craft store and get some supplies, right? But I’m thinking about how important it is to have it for efficiency, like you said, to have it to be under the pad of the finger instead of like having to go up and down and not just like left to right or whatever.
Robert: Yeah. So the idea with most of the raised print systems, you had to trace them with your finger. Whereas, braille you read completely laterally. One of the things that early braille readers often do is what teachers call scrubbing. They’ll move their finger up and down real quickly to try and get a sense of the character shape. And that’s not how proficient braille readers read. We read basically by smoothly moving your hand across the line of text. And there’s a lot of interesting neuroscience work about braille characters and how they’re perceived. And cited people generally think in terms of shape, the shape of characters, and I think there’s good reason to understand braille as more temporal sequences. So dynamic extended sequences of texture rather than shapes of characters. And, like, when I try and tell people what does it feel like to read braille, you can think of like running your finger through sand on the beach or through a bowl of uncooked rice or something, right? It’s where the dots hit your finger pad at a given time rather than focusing on character shape.
And I think I’m going on a limb here, but there’s some good evidence to suggest that one of the reasons why many people who learn braille after being print readers, they often are slower is that their strategy for reading is shape focused rather than focusing on these temporally extended dot sequences, these dot shear patterns, these textures. So that is one difference I think that when we talk about, you mentioned this idea of site-centric views of braille. I think one of those areas is the focus on shape, when in fact, braille appears to be more based in extended patterns of texture and dynamic temporal sequences of dots rather than shapes of things. We can, of course, detect shape, and people can tell you the shapes of braille characters, but that’s not essentially at the most lowest level how braille reading works.
Carrie: My mind, it feels more like those old punch cards that you’ve used for a computer rather than like the writing systems that cited people use.
Robert: Takes a good amount of finger sensitivity and learning to understand what’s coming under your fingertip. Tactile awareness is part of for any, whether a child learning braille as their first writing system or adults learning braille later. Developing these tactile acuity skills is part of what has to happen in the process of learning.
Carrie: So for English, is it still like letter based as opposed to sound based, right?
Robert: It’s alphabetic. Okay. So there are braille characters that transliterate the 26 letters of the English alphabet, but English braille has far more than that. So if you take a text and simply transliterate the print into braille letters, that’s what we call uncontracted braille. But English braille also has a series of 180 forms that we call contractions. And those represent groups of letters like THE, which can represent the word the, if it’s on its own, or it can represent the, THE sequence in brother or therapy or even words like strengthen, or you have short forms that represent old words. So there’s forms that represent words like many and ever, which also can be used for the sequences inside of words. So you’d use the ever contraction in a word like beverage or everybody or even fever There’s 180 of these braille contractions in English braille, and many other languages also use contracted braille. So German braille uses a lot of contraction and almost 300, I think, if I’m not mistaken, French braille is highly contracted. Louis Braille himself came up with most of the contraction systems for French.
And essentially, the reason for that is it saves space, it saves paper, it saves time, it makes it quicker to read. And there has been some claims that say that contracted braille promotes in the reading sciences we talk about, the direct and indirect roots of reading. And that reading contracted braille promotes more of the direct route from form to meaning rather than the indirect route, which is essentially through phonology.
Megan: With the contracted braille, can you tell us about how that blows up a print-centric view of braille? Well, you discuss what adequation is, so all that’s related, right?
Robert: So one of the things that contracted braille does is it, in many cases, Rex sub lexical structure. So things that linguists know about, like morphemes and, for example, are not often paid attention to when braille contractions are used. So there’s a braille contraction for ED, so it’s a atomic symbol, right? It doesn’t not decomposable into E or D. These contractions are unique symbols. So you use this ED symbol in words like redraw, even though it bridges the prefix and the stem. You use it in a word like boredom or freedom, even though it bridges the boundary between the stem and suffix. So as a linguist, one of the things that I’m really interested in is what is the role of morphology and knowledge of morphology. How does that come into play when you’re reading a system like contracted English braille where morphine boundaries are less apparent than they are in reading print? And I want to give a shout-out to my collaborators Simon Fischer-Baum at Rice and Kay Holbrook at the University of British Columbia. That’s one of the things that we’ve been looking at in our work, the effects of reading contracted braille and how that interfaces with morphology and digraphs and things like that.
So that’s one of the ways that the contracted braille differs from print, for example, is in the way that things get grouped together is quite different and has a lot that we can learn from it about how humans process morphemes and that kind of thing and vice versa. Really the braille world has a lot to learn from the reading sciences and from linguistics about how reading works. And my hope is that some of these contraction conventions where morpheme boundaries aren’t respected are going to be changed eventually so that we don’t have things bridging morpheme boundaries in words. Because our work has shown that it interferes with reading that we’ve done some experimental work that shows that readers are slower and make more errors when recognizing words that have bridged morphology, and young children writing braille also make more errors when writing words with bridge morphemes than words where morphemes are not bridged.
Megan: So you shouted out some collaborators; you all have different relationships and histories with braille, which I think is so cool. Before we get any further, can you tell us a little about your history with braille? Because you’re a lifelong braille reader, what’s your history, and is that a unique experience?
Robert: Well, lifelong, maybe a little bit of a stretch, I mean, maybe from kindergarten on. So yeah, I grew up learning braille alongside my cited classmates who were learning print. The history of education for blind children in the United States and around the world has changed a lot in the last few decades. So prior to the 1970s in the United States, most blind and visually impaired children were educated in separate schools for the blind. And around 1973, with the Federal Rehabilitation Act, that started changing, and more and more of us went to school in our local public schools, and we had teachers, they’re called teachers of students with vision impairments, or they previously had been called resource teachers or teachers at the visually impaired, who would pull you out of class for preferably an hour a day to learn braille. So they would work with you on teaching braille and teaching other skills that are really important to have, such as cane travel and other important skills for getting around in the world, that there was really nowhere else to learn those. Now, unfortunately, as we come further and further along, school districts are really cutting back budgets, and we find now that teachers of the visually impaired end up with huge caseloads.
They’re often itinerant teachers who go between multiple schools in a district, and many children are not getting the kinds of education that they need in terms of braille, for example, because the teachers are spread so thin and classroom teachers themselves usually don’t know braille and are certainly not qualified to teach it. So that is one area that needs to really change is the attitude toward braille and towards students who need to learn braille in many of the school districts around the United States and Canada. Not all, there are some districts that are doing really excellent jobs, but it does seem that there are a lot of parents that really have to fight to have their children being taught braille or even to have them taught braille in a way that they actually learn it. And the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act has a provision in it called the braille provision, which basically says any child who is blind or visually impaired should learn braille unless there’s an evaluation done that shows otherwise. But the way that comes about in when the rubber hits the road is different from district to district, and there’s definitely a lot of kids who are falling through the cracks.
Megan: Is it at a point where you’re getting to where they’re violating the ADA?
Robert: Some probably are, yeah. There’s also a lot of, let’s just say, grassroots activism from organizations like the National Federation of the Blind or the American Council of the Blind, where blind people are working with kids, teaching them braille during the summertime and supplementing what they may or may not be getting in the schools.
Megan: And this goes back to what you said at the beginning, where literacy is a human right, and it’s enshrined too, or supposed to be, in the American Disabilities Act and the braille provision.
Robert: I think the braille provision is the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. That’s the idea.
Megan: Okay. But what we see on the ground or what’s really happening is that it’s not being treated as a basic human right.
Robert: Yeah. Oftentimes it is not. And the same as, I would have to say, is also true for older adults who lose their vision. One of my colleagues on a panel that we just did at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, we had a panel on braille literacy and braille reading and writing. And one of our co-panelists is named Natalie Martin Yellow[?]. She is in Canada at Montreal and works specifically on research on braille in older adults, and whether or not it’s being learned, and how best to teach and learn it. And I think a lot of it comes down to people don’t know much about braille. People find braille to be stigmatizing. Now that stigma against braille really reflects an underlying stigma against blindness, of course, and ableism there or just the idea. I think many people would say, wow, I didn’t know that blind people even still use braille. Do people still use it with all the technology that we have? Why don’t people just use screen readers and audiobooks and that kind of thing?
My response to that and most of those of us who are Braille users is Braille provides access to direct literacy just like print does. So we see how things are spelled, you see punctuation, you see sentence structure, you read at your own pace and in your own voice. Tools like synthetic speech and audiobooks, they’re important parts of our toolbox, but they don’t replace direct literacy just in the same way that there really aren’t, as far as I know, a whole lot of print readers who would say, yes, we should get rid of print and everyone just use synthetic speech and audiobooks. Maybe some people would make that claim, but I don’t think so. I’ve put it so if synthetic speech and audiobooks are not good enough for print readers for sighted people, then why should they be good enough for people who are blind? Again, it’s a matter of literacy being a basic human right.
Carrie: Also, how are they going to do that, like on elevators or wherever they’re just going to have screen readers everywhere? That doesn’t make any sense.
Robert: No, there are a lot of people who don’t read braille. You often will see raised printed numbers that could be read as well. You’re exactly right. The idea of replacing braille and or print with things like screen readers or audiobooks, it doesn’t foster literacy in the same way as print reading or braille reading does. It’s interesting you mentioned elevators, and I often like to start out, which we didn’t do here. I forgot. But I often like to start out conversations about braille and talks about braille in terms of having people think about where do you see braille in the environment? Where have you encountered braille? Where have you noticed it?
Carrie: Yeah, certainly elevators or like crossing signals are the places I’ve seen them most recently. I’ve also seen a few Tik-Tok videos about people taking notes using braille. Yeah, just in my day-to-day life, I would say mostly infrastructure, I guess.
Megan: Yeah, medical buildings, I think federal buildings. I remember thinking that this is because of the law.
Robert: Well, all public buildings are required under the ADA to have braille signage, so braille signage, braille room numbers, that kind of thing.
Megan: Is it then required that museums are supposed to provide this too?
Robert: The requirements have more to do with signage for room numbers and elevators. And everyone always mentions elevators, and I’m thinking of a anecdote that a friend of mine named Georgina Kleege, who was a professor at UC, Berkeley, taught in the English department creative writing. And she’s written a number of really excellent books on blindness and braille and from a disability studies perspective. And one of the articles that she wrote, I recommend her work if people are interested, but one of the articles that she wrote was called Visible Braille/Invisible Blindness, talking about how people often see braille in public spaces or braille is used in things like art exhibits as decoration or to symbolize something, but what’s not being seen are actual blind people and actual blind people using braille. And she starts that article with an anecdote she had heard from a mother with a small child, probably 3 or 4 years old, and the child says, Why do all the blind people live in elevators? And the mother says, What it makes you think blind people live in elevators? And the child says, Well, that’s where all the braille is.
Megan: Oh, my goodness.
Robert: Right. So you can kind of imagine, yeah, exactly. From a kid’s perspective, if that’s really, really the only places you see braille, then it doesn’t come as a surprise that a child might think that. Think about it from the perspective of a blind child who is becoming a braille learner, the early literacy environment for sighted kids. I asked you to think about where you’ve seen braille in the environment. I guess the flip side is where have you seen print in the environment, which you don’t really have to think about, right? So for the pre-literacy environments of cited children, there’s print all over the place. You can point it out, they notice it, they, hopefully, are getting an understanding of what it is. Whereas you don’t have that for the early literacy environments of braille reading children. So you have to work really hard around the home and around other places to make braille available where kids can find it and can come across it. Yeah, there’s some really excellent books that are in both print and braille. So it works both ways, right? A cited parent can read with their blind children or vice versa. A blind parent or guardian can read with their sighted kids. There’s a lot of really cool resources out there that promote the use of braille.
Megan: I want to go back to, I’m thinking, the museum and experiencing what’s in a museum and being an active participant in your own literacy, right? So being an active reader. I think about how I won’t listen to an audiobook, but I am a visual reader. Literacy is visual for me, but I want to engage with the text by reading it, and it’s the same thing here, right? You want to be an active participant instead of just having to listen to a screen reader.
Robert: You want to be able to read at your own pace and from your own voice, and if you need to enjoy reading a sentence or a word or something, you want to be able to stop and go back and do that. So yeah, it’s super important. And I would say in terms of technology, now more than ever, technology makes braille more accessible and more available than in previous generations. So I’m of the generation that straddles this growing up and partway into grad school or really was, I don’t want to say, pre-internet, that’s not quite right for grad school. But so what we have now is a lot of technology braille displays and braille embossers, and I have a braille display that hooks up with Bluetooth to my iPhone or to my PC, and I can download a book on Kindle or on any of the apps that you can and just start reading it right away. Whereas, in previous generations, so when I was in high school and college, if you wanted a book in braille, you would have to send off the print copy to a human who would transcribe it, and it would take months and months and months, and eventually, you’d get your book. But the real-time nature of braille right now is fantastic. So when people say technology is making braille obsolete, I would say no, it’s actually making braille more available and more accessible than ever before. You can have instant access to it.
Megan: I got chills right now because I’m thinking, like, how important. I’m an avid reader, and the idea that a Kindle could get me a book immediately, I didn’t have to wait until like the next day to go to the store or something. The fact that you can do that, now technology has made it so that people that are tactile readers have that too. That seems exciting.
Robert: It’s very exciting. That’s like, why do I want people to get out of me being on this podcast? One of them is that technology has really done amazing things for the availability and accessibility of braille. So it’s not making it obsolete. It makes it more available.
Carrie: Yeah. It’s a nice reminder that tech doesn’t always have to be this destructive. I’m feeling pretty anti-tech right now because of the all the AI stuff, but…
Megan: So I wonder, with all this in mind, a big buzz phase right now is the science of reading. How can we move forward from this place where the science of reading erases braille erases blindness? It comes from a sight-centric visual reading perspective.
Robert: Yeah, so a couple things on that. I don’t think that the science of reading has intentionally erased braille or blindness. I think it’s just a matter of it hasn’t been on people’s radar, and that’s one of the things that my colleagues and I are trying to do. So part of our work is raising awareness of the reading sciences in the braille world. So what the science of reading has taught us about how reading works, how the brain works, how we process language, but on the other side of the coin, raising awareness about braille in the reading sciences, and I should put a plug in for our recent article. Position paper on braille and the reading sciences de-centering the cited norm, which was just recently published in the Journal of Applied Psycholinguistics. We give an overview of braille and how it’s read and how it’s written, and how it works in various languages, but also, we talk about how it’s been gone under the radar in the reading sciences and how having the reading sciences more involved in braille research will be helpful, both for the braille world, but also for understanding more about how reading works, the diversity of writing systems that we have in the world. Most of the science of reading has done a really good job about looking at writing across the world’s languages and the world’s writing systems, but for some reason, nobody’s really been thought to include tactile writing in that whole discussion.
So I was excited about a year ago when the second edition of the Science of Reading a handbook came out, and I thought, well, maybe there’ll finally be a chapter on some mention of braille in this, you know? But again, there this wonderful volume that encapsulates most of general knowledge of the reading sciences. Doesn’t even mention Braille once, and I don’t think it’s intentionally erasing braille, but the fact that it isn’t there leads to its erasure because people think, as I’ve been told when I’ve gone to present at Science of Reading conferences early on, I had a fairly well-known person in the field say, well braille is not visual, so we don’t think of it as reading it’s more special ed. And I said, well, I think we need to talk about that. So I don’t think this person was counting on me pushing back as hard as I did, but it needed to be pushed back on because exactly that problem when handbooks of the reading sciences or when general interest books about reading and writing don’t even mention braille, then nobody thinks about braille. And if
nobody thinks about it, then nobody does research on it. So to your question about how the reading and science of have erased braille, it’s more sort of this passive erasure where you just don’t talk about it. And so it’s sort of self-fulfilling.
So my colleagues and I are aiming to put braille into the reading sciences, see how interesting this all is. We really need to be paying attention to this, not only for people who are blind and visually impaired and literacy but also for the scientific importance of understanding what it means to be a tactile reader. And there have been some good work. So there is a
psychologist in Britain who published a book in 1997 called Reading by Touch, which was… Her name is Susanna Millar, and she was one of the few people that had spent most of her career looking at braille, reading, and writing from a cognitive psychology perspective. But other than that, there’s just been a few articles here and there, mostly by sighted researchers. Millar was cited as well, but done good work. But oftentimes, people who are not themselves braille readers and don’t have the deep knowledge of braille will say really stupid things about braille that a reader would say. That’s not true. So trying to get more people who are braille readers and writers into the science of reading to do this kind of work, I think, is really important.
One of the areas that there has been a fair amount of work in is in the
neuroscience fields because someone noticed in the late 1990s that the
primary visual cortex of braille readers lit up when they were reading braille. And that was one of the… It shocked the neuroscience world at that point and is what has led to our understanding of neuroplasticity, that what we originally had thought of as these distinct areas. There’s this part for vision, there’s this part for audition, there’s this part, you know? When people notice that congenitally blind people use their visual cortex in braille reading, it led to some really big questions, part of the change in the neuroscience world to understanding neuroplasticity. Now, the problem with that work is a lot of people will see that and just make assumptions. Oh, so braille reading is just like print reading. See, it’s the same thing. They even use the visual cortex. There’s all sorts of problems with that line of thinking about it. The idea that just because you see a region of the brain being used in some activity doesn’t mean it’s doing the same computational work as it is say, for print readers and braille readers. So there’s been a lot of work since then, digging into this question of what is it that the so-called primary visual cortex is doing in the brains of people who are congenitally blind, for example.
Megan: And is it a misnomer, right? Is the visual part a misnomer?
Robert: Well, I think we have to think in terms of prototypes, right? I mean, prototypically, for most human beings, primary visual cortex is used primarily for vision. But in people who are congenitally blind, for example, it gets recruited for other functions. And there’s a cognitive scientist at Johns Hopkins named Marina Bedney, who does fantastic work in this area of researching neuroscience in people who are congenitally blind. So I’s recommend her work.
Megan: That’s really, really neat. I mean, just as a scientist, it’s like, this stuff is really, really cool. And I like that you mentioned you don’t want people to take it too far and say, Oh, well, it’s basically just like what parent reading is. That gets us into how the stigmatization keeps perpetuating itself, right? And I also, in your paper, which is fantastic, when you talk about how children who have low vision, it’s like print at any cost.
Carrie: It’s just like oralism at any cost for, yeah.
Robert: Yeah. It’s interesting that you mentioned oralism, and I don’t like to make comparisons between braille and ASL because the general population makes those comparisons enough. People will say things like; You’re blind? I don’t know ASL. I’m like, Well, that’s nice, but you’ve got the wrong disability here, or a friend of mine has a child who’s deaf, and people will say, Well, I don’t know braille, I can’t communicate. I’m like, well, wrong disability. So, people tend to bring those two together. I don’t like to necessarily talk about braille and ASL in the same sentence because I don’t want to perpetuate the all disabilities of the same kind of thing. But it is interesting because when I was talking earlier about Samuel Howe and his attitude about using Ray print because you don’t want blind people to be somehow different. He, along with Alexander Graham Bell and other people, were also really strong proponents of this oralism movement in the 19th century that basically were anti-ASL, anti-death education. So it all comes from the same idea that there’s somehow something bad about doing things differently than other people come a long way since then, thinking of disability not as a deficit, not as a medical deficit, or even a social deficit. Yeah, it’s not a problem. It’s a difference. The way I read is not a problem. It’s just a different way. And it highlights different aspects of human cognition and perception and linguistic processing.
It is not a deficit. It is part of the wonderful diverse experiences and diversity of human beings overall. When you talk about… You mentioned this idea of print at any cost or the stigmas that are associated with braille, a lot of those stigmas, again, are because of the stigmas that surround blindness and disabilities in general. So this idea of ad equation that we talked about, the idea that braille is just like print, so even done in this same part of the brain, that’s sort of what I meant by adequation. And so then people don’t think that it should be studied separately, or they’ll use methodologies or assessment materials for braille readers that were designed for print readers, despite the different modality and the different perceptual things. Then there’s erasure, which is simply braille doesn’t get any mention, and so it doesn’t get studied. But there’s a lot of other stigma around braille. The idea that braille
is too difficult or too slow, and none of those things are really true, or parents who don’t want their children to somehow be stigmatized will really push hard against learning braille because, to them, it highlights the child’s disability. Do you want your child to be reading print like 40 point font, maybe one character at a time, very, very slowly and getting headaches and eye strain and all that comes with it, or do you want your kid to be reading fluently, 200 and some words omitted in braille with your fingertips, like I and other blind people do, you know?
Megan: No, absolutely. Thank you so much for coming on today because it starts with awareness, right? That’s what’s so important, and I think that there are a lot of people listening right now. They’ve probably learned a lot today, and that’s great. Don’t be ashamed.
Carrie: Like you’re saying, how could we possibly know a lot of this stuff if it’s not even talked about? Yes, we can all do a better job, but some of it is just not being put in front of us.
Megan: Right. And we all have different lived experiences, so sometimes we can’t imagine beyond that and tell what’s pointed out. So yes, don’t be ashamed that we’re pointing it out right now.
Robert: Well, I would say don’t. This is not a matter of being ashamed, but be curious and go check it out. And I don’t want to put another plugin for my paper but definitely read our paper because it gives you some good places to start. And Im always happy to talk with people on email or whatever. I teach a course at Rice called Research on Braille, which I started in 2009 in the 200th bicentennial of Louis Braille birth, and thought this could be interesting. What can we do from a linguistics cognitive science perspective about braille? So check out that syllabus that’s on my website. So be curious. I think is. I don’t want to frame this as don’t be ashamed, but like, be curious. There’s so much cool stuff out there, and Braille is one of the cool writing systems of the worlds languages, you know? So often in intro linguistics textbooks, I would see a mention of braille. Braille is not a language, it’s a writing system, and that’s kind of where it ended. Well, writing systems are cool too, and we can learn a lot about perception, about cognition, about language from understanding variety of the world’s writing systems, including braille.
Carrie: Absolutely. Yeah. Do you have any final thoughts for our listeners before we let you go?
Robert: I don’t think so. There’s so many other things that I have in my notes here, but I think we’ve said all we needed. Although, I do have to say there’s a lot of good things about braille. You can read in the Dark as a child. You don’t have to have your parents knowing that you’re reading after bedtime. Although I think my parents probably knew. You can read on a podium. Your audience doesn’t have to know that you’re actually reading your talk because your hands are doing it, not your face. I’m not going to start out and say, Oh, braille is better than print. This is not a valuation judgment, but there are certainly a lot of cool things that you can do with your hands when you read that you can’t do with your eyes.
Carrie: It’s better in some circumstances, for sure. That’s cool. Well, thank you so much for being here today.
Robert: Yeah, thank you for having me. This is a lot of fun.
Carrie: Yeah. And so, in addition to be curious, we leave our listeners with a final message. Don’t be an asshole.
Robert: Words to live by.
Carrie: Right?
Robert: Thank you.
Automated Voice Recorder: The Vocal Fries Podcast is produced by me, Carrie Gillon. Theme music by Nick Granum. You can find us on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram @vocalfriespod. You can email us at vocalfriespod@gmail.com, and our website is vocalfriedpod.com.
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The Vocal Fries Pod 