Today, we’re taking you back to Amsterdam to present an exciting lecture by Dr. Niyisabwa Odette Tumwesigye, who works with visually impaired children in Uganda and, quite literally, sows the seeds for Braille.
Yes, you read that correctly: seeds actually play a very real role here!
This is a fascinating insight into a very practical, creative, and important early intervention for children with visual impairments and a great reason to
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A brief summary and the link can be found below.
Braille 200 wishes you an enjoyable watch.
Summary
In the Tactile Reading & Graphics Conference Amsterdam 2025, Dr. Niyisabwa Odette Tumwesigye from Kyambogo University, Uganda, explain that she loves preparing blind children to learn braille using locally available materials. They use local types of seeds of different sizes and start from easy to complex.
They use three containers. In one of them, corn and beans are mixed, they are quite different in size and shape. The child has to sort them to the two other containers. Then peas and soja beans have to be sorted, which are more similar, then sorghum (a traditional crop in eatern and northern Uganda) with small stones or lapena (a kind of dried legume seeds of the same size), then then seeds of the size of braille dots like millet and simsimi (sesame). These kind of exercises can take from one week to one month.
Another training is fitting for fine motoric skills: fitting buckets into each other and other things.
The next exercise is tracking for example threads or banana fibers.
Then children learn to cut with scissors for finger training. All these pre-reading skills are very important for preparing to read braille..
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