Braille typewriters are a truly great invention!
But, it must be admitted, they do have a few peculiarities and disadvantages.
They are large, they are heavy, and above all, they are comparatively very loud.
For Judit Gombás, these were three very good reasons not to use this aid.
And today, in her short obituary, she tells us how she solved this problem.
Thank you, Judit, for this little insight into your early Braille life!
In memoriam my slate and stylus
I used to be a low-vvision kid, so until the age of eleven I was able to read print and write in ink. Then, within a couple of months, my eyesight deteriorated so quickly that I was no longer able to read my own handwriting or large print. My very wise teachers had earlier taught me Braille, saying I might need it one day. In fact, that day came very quickly.
First, I used a Perkins typewriter. It was very, very noisy, but since I went to a special school for children with visual impairment, it was not so strange, everyone accepted the noise I made. I was fifteen when I started attending a mainstream secondary school. I was a teenager who wanted to be the least different from the others. I absolutely protested against carrying to school a noisy typewriter, and I couldn’t accept to be the only noisy kid in class. So, I decided to use a slate and stylus. This all happened in the 90s, back then students didn’t have laptops in Hungary. I had some adult blind friends (I’ll always be grateful to them) who had had taught me to use these tools. Of course, writing with a slate is slow, so I learnt contracted English and Hungarian Braille, and when I started learning Spanish and Italian, I invented my own systems of contracted braille in these languages. I just loved to go to secondary school and later to university with a small backpack. At that time, I wrote with the slate with an incredible speed, and had a very muscly right palm, too.
I am not saying this was the right solution. But this was the best solution for note taking for me, and I loved it. Recently, I rarely use my slate and stylus, but they come handy sometimes when I prefer to speak, for example, from written notes. So, let’s not forget about this great tool.
Judit Gombás Dr.
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