The Difference the Dots Make: A Personal History with Braille:

Although braille has been used in the United States since as early as the 1860s and its use has opened career opportunities to hundreds of thousands of blind people, in most public schools braille is not taught to blind students, and the right to learn braille was not codified in the legal system of the United States until 1998. Very few college programs that instruct teachers of the blind demand fluency in the reading and writing of braille sufficient to permit a graduate to pick up a braille page and read it with ease. Reading a braille book for pleasure is a concept that many blind people and many teachers of the blind simply do not have. The year 2009 is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Louis Braille. His reading and writing system for the blind is the most important invention ever created for blind people; it has brought opportunity and joy to the hearts of millions. The National Federation of the Blind (NFB) has declared this year the year of braille literacy--the year of Braille Readers are Leaders. We want to double the braille literacy rate for the blind of the United States, and we have received support for our aspirations from many quarters. The U.S. Mint has been instructed by Congress to strike a commemorative silver dollar with readable, properly made braille embossed upon it. If our society believes that blind people have something to contribute, then we will believe in the tools used by the blind, and braille is one of the most important. LEARNING TO CHERISH BRAILLE My own experience with braille began at the age of 6. At the school for the blind, those of us in the first grade who had very little remaining vision were taught braille. We started by studying flash cards, but fairly soon we graduated to the Dick and Jane basal readers. Sixteen of us were in the class, arranged in two rows of eight students. My desk was the sixth one from the front in the first row. We were told to open our books to page 1. The teacher asked the first student in the first row to read the braille page. When the student had trouble reading, the teacher corrected the errors made by the student. Then, the teacher called upon the second student in the row and again corrected that student's errors. Before the teacher came to me, we had been through this exercise five times. When my turn came, the teacher asked me to read page 1. I put my fingers on the page and spoke the words that were there. The teacher called me to the front of the room, expressed her satisfaction in my ability to read, and pasted a gold star on page one of my book. It is the only gold star I have ever received. My family lived more than 100 miles from the school. On weekends, my father came to pick me up for the drive to our home. When he appeared at our first-grade class on Friday afternoon, my teacher advised me to take my book home with me to show to my mother. My mother had learned braille because she thought she might need to know it to communicate with me or to help me with my homework. I carried my book home with me, and I showed my mother my gold star. Because my mother is a suspicious woman, she asked if she could borrow my book, and I gave it to her. Later, during the weekend, she brought me a piece of braille paper with words on it, and she asked me to read it. When I told her that I could not, she said that it was an exact copy of page 1 of my book. When I had completed the first grade, during the summer months, my mother took me in hand. She decided that I was to learn braille. For an hour each day she taught me to read. I objected. My brothers didn't have homework during the summer; I was the only one. But my mother insisted, and I had no alternative. By the end of that summer I had learned to read. I returned to the school for the blind in the fall, and I discovered the school library. By the time I had finished the fifth grade, I had read every book in the school library that the librarian would let me have. …