A recent article in the New York Times discussed the importance of braille literacy. After reading this article we have found critical points and useful information regarding the importance of braille.
The following is a summary of the New York Times article, using their ideas, research, and references.
Less than 10% of the 1.3 million legally blind people read braille. In today's age of technology it makes sense that people are shying away from learning braille. Braille books are large and expensive and there are many alternative technologies to read and communicate besides the written word.
Studies are showing that blind people that never learned braille have a more difficult time writing and communicating their thoughts. One particular study found that students that read braille wrote better stories, while those that just used a keyboard and played back their writing typically wrote very disorganized and disjointed stories.
Writing stories may not seem like a critical part of life, but most often blind people get jobs doing intellectual work rather than jobs involving manual labor. Being able to properly communicate through your writing is important in an intellectual work place. It is believed that this is why people that have learned braille as a child are twice as likely to be employed as those that had not.
The visual cortex takes up over 20% of the human brain and was typically thought to only be accessible by sighted people. Recent brain imaging studies have shown that reading braille actually stimulates the visual cortex in a blind person. It has also been found that if the visual cortex does not have images to process, it can reorganize for new functions, such as memory.
As you can see, although there are tools to read a book or a letter out loud, it is still advantageous to know braille. Braille helps blind people understand the fundamentals of language and convey them in their written communications. It also helps to stimulate the brain.
To see the original NY Times article or to see their references, please visit: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/magazine/03Braille-t.html
