Web Tool Suggestion from Jane

I became interested in braille literacy and the tools that the visually impaired use to read and write and communicate through print with the sighted world this past Spring. A classmate of ours in the L&L program is blind from birth. She has since moved on, completing all her classwork in two years and graduating in June. And she has a job -- teaching sighted undergraduates in a community college near her home. Through Megan I gained new understanding and respect for the barriers and biases that the visually impaired encounter every day. Intrigued by her example, I did my final paper for the class, Theories and Models of Adult Education, on braille literacy. Here are some statistics from the Braille Institute website:

• Nearly 12 percent of 55,000 legally blind children in the United States can read braille. This literacy rate is down significantly from 50 percent in the 1960s.


• In 1968, out of 19,902 blind students enrolled in elementary and secondary education, 40 percent read braille, 45 percent read large type or regular print, and 4 percent read both. In January 1993, out of 50,204 blind students, fewer than 9 percent could read braille, 27 percent could read print, and 40 percent could not read at all. In other words, while there are 40,000 more blind children in school today, only 30 percent can read.

And the most chilling statistic of all:

• Approximately 90 percent of blind jobholders in the United States are braille literate.

Literacy for blind and visually impaired individuals is defined as the ability to read and write in braille. As you can see from the above statistics, many of our blind citizens are not being well served by our education system.

The tool I am offering is: http://www.bookshare.org/readingTools

This tool from the bookshare site allows blind or visually impaired individuals to listen to books on their computers. Members can download books from the thousands available and have them read to them on their computers with this software tool.