The Impacts of Braille Today

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Imagine a life in darkness, not being able to see anything, not knowing what something as simple as a picture looks like. That’s what blind people have to go through every day. Blind people don’t know what anything around them looks like, their mom, dad, nothing. How do they read? Braille, the blind use braille daily and without it they would need someone with them 24/7 to read everything such as bathroom signs. Let’s explore braille and how it came to be how it is today by answering questions like what was the need for braille, what was life like before braille, what was the impact of braille then, and what is the impact of braille today?
The need for braille then is simple the blind needed an easier way to read and write and there were many teams of people looking at ways for blind people to read. Louis Braille was on a team and he discovered this French “Night Writing” and then the idea for the six dot cell system emerged. The problem is that many people want to eliminate braille completely because “technology can do it for them”. That’s like going into a class room of six year old students and telling them that they don’t need to learn reading and writing because technology will do it for them. It sounds silly, but blind children are told that every day. When children with vision loss are learning to read, braille is the best way to develop spelling, grammar, and punctuation skills. Audiotapes and computers that speak through a voice synthesizer program provide access to all sorts of written tools, but they don’t give new readers the tools they need to read and write themselves. Studies have shown that people with vision loss who can read braille are far more likely to get a job than someone that relies on v...

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...te braille altogether even though braille can never be eliminated because they need it to learn to spell and use punctuation. Studies show that blind people who use braille are more likely to get a job than someone without braille. Braille improved education in many ways, it gave a university accepted system which helped make education for the blind more organized and successful, also it was the most compacted system which made it easier to read and more fluent. Before braille reading was hard for the blind because it was lettering in large pieces of wood and it was influent and really slow. Many blind people ended up as beggars because their families couldn’t support them and they didn’t have the education to get a job. And that answers the questions of, what was life like before braille, what was the need for braille, what was the impact of braille then, and now.

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