toledoblade.com -- Sighted learn braille from blind teacher

BOWLING GREEN — Without looking at their playing cards, Kate Smolik and Jenny Keeler counted on their sense of touch during a recent game of rummy at Wood County Library.

Using a special deck of cards embossed with the braille dots that sight-impaired people are trained to read, Ms. Smolik, 31, of Defiance, kept her eyes covered with a blindfold as Ms. Keeler, 31, of Ottawa, squeezed her eyes shut.

“It’s harder than I thought,” Ms. Smolik said. “I haven’t practiced in a while.”

Ms. Smolik, who had regularly practiced learning to recognize the braille alphabet when students in the English class she teaches at Defiance High School were busy with quiet activities, said she would need a lot more practice before she could master the method.

The women were among six seeing adults learning to read braille from Sheri Wells-Jensen, who is blind and has been reading by touch most of her life, in a class held on Mondays in October at the library. Ms. Wells-Jensen is on sabbatical from her position as a linguistics instructor at Bowling Green State University and said she didn’t expect her newest students to master tactile reading. Instead, she hoped to urge them to “rethink what blind people can do.”

With a grant from the National Federation for the Blind, Ms. Wells-Jensen used braille playing cards and a Velcro board to teach her students how to use touch to translate the raised dots.

“I had two goals, really. One, to teach some braille. And two, to bring out the point that there are a variety of ways to do almost anything, and only one is by looking,” Ms. Wells-Jensen said. “But it’s not always the most effective way to do things.”

Braille is a system of communicating letters and numerals in a series of raised patterns arranged on grids of six dots. The system was created by Louis Braille in the early 1800s, but new technology has made it easier than ever to translate text into braille. Ms. Wells-Jensen uses a paperless device to check her e-mail that translates the text into braille using a screen of moveable pins.

Fewer than 10 percent of sight-impaired youngsters learn to read braille, which means that most blind children are effectively illiterate, according to the National Federation for the Blind.

“That’s a crisis,” Ms. Wells-Jensen said. “If those were sighted kids, people would be marching in the streets. People would be appalled.”

Part of the braille literacy problem could be that educators often advocate voice-recognition software rather than braille displays for blind students, said Dawn Christensen, executive director of the Sight Center of Northwest Ohio. Without a computer, she said, the software is useless. So paper embossed with braille is often a better — and more portable — option.

It doesn’t help that most businesses don’t offer promotional materials or bills in braille, she added.

“It really needs to begin somewhat with the person that is blind, they need to advocate on their own behalf,” Ms. Christensen said. Remind “businesses the population they may be leaving out, the customers they may be leaving out by not having information in braille.”

In class, Ms. Wells-Jensen displayed the braille characters with pink dots stuck with Velcro on poster board. For her final session, she had a special helper — 8-year-old Alex Mitov, who is also blind and has mastered braille. He accompanied his mother, Mariana Mitova, who wanted to improve her skills reading braille by touch. She said she relies on sight to recognize the braille characters.

Ms. Wells-Jensen passed out pocket sized braille calendars to her students and challenged them to find certain dates by touch.

Ms. Smolik found her fingers on one of the 200 braille contractions — alternate symbols that may represent a prefix or suffix of a word.

“What’s a backwards ‘P’?” she asked.

Alex smiled and bounced in his chair as he offered, “TH!”

Ms. Mitova, of Bowling Green, said both she and her son gained something from the experience — while her braille skills got a boost, so did his confidence.

“I wanted him to have a good experience, too,” Ms. Mitova said. “For him, that meant to use his special skills and teach other people who don’t know what he knows.”

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