Susanna Halme came across a very interesting article during her Braille research.
Thank you very much, dear Susanna, for sharing this find with us.
Reading tip:
I’d like to recommend an article I came across while working on my thesis, which I thought was excellent. It highlights the fact that in literacy research, braille has largely been left behind. In addition, braille has often been viewed from a sight-centric or print-centric perspective. In other words, braille has been understood as being tied to the print text used by sighted people: braille is seen as a way to represent print text in a tactile modality; braille is seen as a code that conveys print through a set of symbols; braille is seen as a replacement for print for those who cannot see regular letters. Such perspectives are deeply rooted among both sighted people and people with visual impairments.
These viewpoints can have problematic consequences, as they do not recognize braille’s own independent value. If we move away from these perspectives, braille could be studied and taught for its own sake, on its own terms. Braille could be approached through the lenses of diversity and the human-rights dimension of literacy. It is an extremely interesting and sophisticated system that should not be seen only in relation to sighted people’s practices. It has its own value and its own characteristics that are neither sight-centric nor print-centric.
Abstract:
This article positions braille as a writing system worthy of study in its own right and on its own terms. We begin with a discussion of the role of braille in the lives of those who read and write it and a call for more attention to braille in the reading sciences. We then give an overview of the history and development of braille, focusing on its formal characteristics as a writing system, in order to acquaint sighted print readers with the basics of braille and to spark further interest among reading researchers. We then explore how print-centric assumptions and sight-centric motivations have potentially negative consequences, not only for braille users but also for the types of questions researchers think to pursue. We conclude with recommendations for conducting responsible and informed research about braille. We affirm that blindness is most equitably understood as but one of the many diverse ways humans experience the world. Researching braille literacy from an equity and diversity perspective provides positive, fruitful insights into perception and cognition, contributes to the typologically oriented work on the world’s writing systems, and contributes to equity by centering the perspectives and literacy of the people who read and write braille.
useful links:
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