Full Transcript
Pete:
Introducing a new braille book entitled Unified English Braille Practice Sentences.
Roberta:
This book is for teachers who are teaching braille to blind students, it works for anyone from beginning braille readers all the way up to adults.
Pete:
Our guests are Lori Scharff-
Lori:
It’s like a parent wanted to work with a child and review things they could.
Pete:
-and Roberta Becker, author of the new book.
Roberta:
It’s a different kind of book in that it presents everything in a very systematic manner.
Pete:
They talk about a variety of topics ranging from the implementation of UEB-
Roberta:
UEB has changed because of the need for computers, because a lot of the things that were in the old braille were very difficult when using computers.
Pete:
-to specific changes it has brought about and how those changes are covered in Roberta’s book.
Lori:
The good thing is Roberta does have experience as a 30-year teacher of the visually impaired as well as a rehab teacher, so she really gets the broad spectrum of the whole field.
Pete:
Learn about this exciting new teaching tool that is already in use across the United States and around the world.
Roberta:
The book is on my website, www.actualtactuals.com.
Pete:
And now let’s join Jeff Thompson in the Blind Abilities studio, along with his guests, Roberta-
Roberta:
-and Jeff, if you had used this book when you were in school you would never have learned to read in just grade one, you would have gone directly to grade two-
Pete:
-and Lori.
Lori:
More people need support and they need fun things to read and fun things to do with braille to help reinforce that they can read as a blind person.
Jeff:
Welcome to Blind Abilities, I’m Jeff Thompson. In the studio with me is Roberta Becker and Lori Scharff, how are you doing?
Lori:
Good!
Jeff:
That’s good! Roberta, you’ve created a new book for the unified Braille, can you tell us about that?
Roberta:
Yes, this book is for teachers who are teaching braille to blind students, and they can be students of any age, it works for anyone from beginning braille readers all the way up through adults, it’s a different kind of book in that it presents everything in a very systematic manner, introduces the contractions, one at a time, so that there’s no confusion for the students, it makes it very easy. There are practice sentences for each contraction, and the sentences are easy, and they’re very fun and they’re interesting. A lot of the sentences include materials that are important for blind children to learn about and they promote discussion. It’s a series of sentences, and sentences use the contractions as much as they can, more than once. So for instance, one of the sentences that uses A-R contractions is “Mark has to park the car at the yard,” so that uses four A-R contractions, there’s a lot of repetition of the contractions as you can hear. When the students are writing sentences or reading sentences, there are no unexpected contractions because it’s done in such a way that only the contractions that have been previously taught are used in the sentences. Once a new contraction is taught, it starts being used in the sentences. There’s a lot of use of the previously taught contractions, all the way from the beginning of the book, but nothing past the point that you’re at, and it moves in a direction from easiest sentence using that particular contraction to the hardest sentence using a contraction. So the easiest one would have maybe one or two contractions, the hardest might have four to six contractions in it.
Jeff:
That’s great.
Lori:
This is Lori, I just wanted to say the book also, in addition to being used by rehabilitation teachers teaching braille and teachers of the visually impaired teaching children, it’s also being used by transcribers that are learning braille, as well as some of the university programs to supplement other materials for learning practice, and it comes in a single space edition and the double space edition for children that might have some difficulties or new braille readers that are needing to have larger spaces between the lines for tracking ease. The book is interpoint, and in the print edition on facing pages the sentences are written in print, and on the opposite page, there is visual braille that shows you what the equivalent would be, so if like parent wanted to work with a child and review things they could, but not actually know braille.
Roberta:
Or maybe the aide in a classroom, who doesn’t know braille as well as the teacher does.
Jeff:
Now, there’s been some institutions and some schools that have taken on your book that are using it today.
Roberta:
Oh yes, it’s being used all over the United States in public schools, schools for the blind and the universities. It’s used in Canada, the United Kingdom,, Australia and New Zealand. It’s really met with a lot of very positive reviews, which can be seen on the website.
Jeff:
You got the whole globe almost covered, that’s pretty good.
Roberta:
Just the English-speaking part.
Jeff:
I heard that it’s being used here in Minnesota, at the Minnesota State Academy for the Blind as well.
Roberta:
Yes it is. They have come back because we had a first edition and now we have the second edition, so it’s very nice to know that.
Lori:
There is a braille teacher’s edition which contains everything that the print book has, as well as a student edition, so the teachers edition gives some additional hints and things like that, ways to work with children.
Jeff:
Now, Lori, how did you get involved with Roberta on working with this book?
Lori:
I was Roberta’s very first braille student, many moons ago, I was privileged to have her all through my academic career as a student from the middle of kindergarten right through high school, so we’ve stayed in touch, even since then, and I’ve helped her develop sentences and think about concepts to include in a sentence that may be something you would want to work on with a blind child to reinforce understanding of certain things, so that’s kind of how we’ve stayed connected through the years.
Jeff:
Roberta, what led you to create this book? You’re sighted; how did you get involved in braille?
Roberta:
Actually I was a TVI, and before that when I was studying to become a teacher, I happened to go into the braille library to pick up some books, and some materials to show in my class, it was a sighted class, and while I was at the library I heard the braille teacher say- she wasn’t speaking to me, I heard her talk to the librarian and ask about the braille class, and I thought oh, that’s for me, I want to take that class, so I took braille, I became certified before I completed college, and then eventually I ended up working for Industrial Home for the Blind, and then I became a TVI. When I was going to school to get my certification in being a TVI, I was really fortunate to meet Sally Mangold, you may not be familiar with her name, but a lot of people will. She was like the cream of the crop of educators for blind people, and her husband was Phil Mangold, they asked me to write a book together, it came out as literary braille contractions, it was before we changed to UEB, it was an eBay method. So I wrote that, and they sold that for about 30 years, and then UEB came along, and I just thought, oh, somebody really needs to redo this book into UEB, and it ended up being us, Lori and I.
Jeff:
Now there might be some people out there that have been reading braille, but not in tuned with- may I call it the new braille?
Roberta:
UEB.
Jeff:
Yeah, can you explain that to the listeners?
Roberta:
Yeah, UEB has changed because of the need for computers, because a lot of things that were in the old braille were very difficult when, you know, using with computers- for example, there was a D-B contraction which is a dropped D, and people who are familiar with the older braille know that if it’s at the beginning of a word it stands for the letters C-I-S, if it’s in the middle of the word it’s a D-D, and if it’s at the end of the word it’s a period, but it’s the same configuration. If it’s seen by a computer in the middle of a word as a D-D like in the word “puddle,” the computer would think it’s a period, because it’s a period at the end of the word. So, now because we have embossers and things like Duxbury that convert braille- help me out, Lori.
Lori:
From braille to print. So in the example that she gave it would have showed the D-D contraction in “puddle” as a period in the middle of the word, instead of a D-D contraction. Also, the Unified English Braille code has eliminated some contractions, to prevent duplication, you know, for example a dollar sign would have been previously the same thing as a D-D, or a D-I-S, or a period. Now, in Unified English Braille, it’s made into a two symbol contraction, which is easier to understand, because there’s no guessing on the part of the end user, whether that be something that was translated from braille to print or print to braille so you’re learning one symbol for one thing, basically.
Jeff:
So at some point someone just said, we’ve got to get this worked out, because we’re running into problems here, and was there resistance to this change?
Lori:
Yes, within the blind community, there was a lot of resistance. People felt that it was being created by sighted people who did transcription for money, that it would make things easier on them and that’s why it was created. In my own opinion, as a person who is blind and somebody who is studying now- after a 20-year career as a social worker I’m changing careers and studying to be a VRT, a Vision Rehabilitation Therapist, I understand the changes that have occurred in print over the years, so something that somebody learned as a child in the 60s and 70s and even 80s, print has changed quite a bit, the way we use symbols and things like that are very different, and Unified English Braille allows for that to occur. For example, in the old braille code, you had one symbol that meant underline, bold, or italic, and it was all one symbol, but you as a blind user never knew what it was, it was one of those three. Now there is three separate symbols, and there’s an opening symbol and a closing symbol so you know exactly when it starts, and when it ends. A lot of blind people, myself included, I can read it well, I have some difficulties writing it. That has improved though, because I had to take class in braille. So over the last year I’ve become more proficient at writing it because it’s a lot of muscle memory and changes.
Jeff:
Yeah, I suppose. I mean, Braille is something that, when you talk about muscle memory, I mean, that’s basically what it is when you’re proficient at it, and I suppose when the UEB came into play, it was like, whoa, whoa, the brakes went on and you had to pause for a second. Is there a part of the book, Roberta, that addresses the changes?
Roberta:
No, it does not speak to the specific changes in terms of a list that this has changed, that changed.
Jeff:
A new user would not need to know what was before, this is the way it is today.
Roberta:
That’s right.
Jeff:
Well, that’s good.
Roberta:
But people who have used it are interested in finding out what’s new. A lot of the symbols that are changed in literary parts, the part with the words haven’t changed really all that much, but it’s definitely the parts with the punctuation, the punctuation, and the special symbols that we use, like Lori said before, dollar signs, but in the book we have three appendices, and one is specifically for looking up- well, they’re all specifically for looking up contractions and/or symbols. The first one is for looking up the contractions in the order that they’re presented in the book, you can just look through them and they’ll be exactly in the order that is in the book. The second one is symbols that are in the order of the book, also, by lesson 11, lesson 12, lesson 13 and lesson 14. And the third appendix is the symbols in alphabetical order so you could go right to it and say, oh, what’s an italics sign look like, what does a dollar sign look like? That makes it easier for the reader. Also, there’s a chart for teachers or for people who are teaching braille to themselves, specifically for people can check off whether the student knows the braille configuration for writing, is capable of identifying it for reading, or understands the rules for using it, and they can all be checked off and you can go down the chart and keep track of that for parents, or for the next teacher, because people don’t always get the same teacher year after year.
Jeff:
Oh, that’s true. And there’s so many different styles of teaching. Lori, when you first came into braille, were you like low vision or were you totally blind? Did you fight learning braille or was it something that you needed right now?
Lori:
I actually have retinopathy of prematurity, and I had vision, very limited vision in one eye. Towards the end of first grade I lost the vision that I had in the one eye from a retinal detachment, and I needed to at that point learn braille, so Roberta taught me braille, and I remember using patterns and I remember I used to stick my hand ahead in the book and look for pictures and things like that.
Jeff:
Yeah, that’s really cool. I lost my sight later on, so I fought learning braille a little bit because I had some residual vision, and I’m sure this book with low vision I could look at the pictures and kind of figure some stuff out, but it really came into play, one of the things I always say is that when I got to school to learn braille some girls left a note on my locker, and they put it in grade one and they were upset with me that I didn’t know grade two yet because they had to make their notes in grade one, but it got me interested in reading braille. So I figured out what was going on here, so I had a little card, A through Z and zero through nine, and there I was learning braille and then I had to write back. I had an hour and a half bus ride to and fro, so I was able to get out my slate and stylus, and punch in the dots and get the message back to them.
Lori:
I mean, people always say, oh, isn’t braille harder to learn than print, you know, it’s like the concepts are the same, it’s not like you’re learning a different language, you just have to learn the dot shapes. It’s like a sighted child having to learn the lines and configuration of how to draw, you know, how to write letters and things like that, it’s no different. People just assume because there’s only six dots that make up the whole alphabet and the contractions and things like that. It’s not that much different.
Jeff:
No, and then it starts repeating the pattern, I was into the pattern thing, like once you get to J, you know it’s like, then it’s- and that W from France, you know, it’s like little things like that, it’s like, oh that’s cool, then you start looking for that dot five and the dot six, and it’s really cool to find out, hey, there’s a secret to this.
Roberta:
Hey, Jeff, if you had used this book when you were in school you would never have learned to read in just grade one, you would have gone directly into grade two.
Jeff:
Oh wow, that’s good K to know, knowledge, isn’t it?
Lori:
That’s right!
Roberta:
That’s right, because I don’t believe that you should have to learn to read twice and to learn configurations twice. I think that students can learn it once, and it’s always worked, Lori learned great too from the very beginning.
Jeff:
That’s a neat concept.
Lori:
And that’s primarily how children and adults are taught these days. I came across a pretty funny experience the other day, I have a five-year-old grandson and we were reading a children’s book, and a well-known braille publishing company, for some reason, puts their books out in uncontracted braille, but in this particular book, it’s a rhyming type of book, and then they bolded in print one word on each page, you know, and it was like the left page rhymed with the right page. So the rhyming words were bolded on each page. So, here they wrote the book in uncontracted braille but then did the Unified English Braille symbol for bolding, and I said, oh, this is so confusing. I thought to myself, like, if a blind child was reading this, it would be very confusing for them.
Jeff:
Oh, I bet it would be.
Roberta:
But there are new rules, I just attended a class for BANA, or Braille Authority of North America, and there are rules that are specifically for kindergarten, first and second graders, and then third and fourth graders so that they wouldn’t do that anymore. According to those rules, they would not put bold if it’s irrelevant to the story.
Lori:
Right.
Jeff:
So, BANA is the braille police.
Lori:
BANA is the Braille Authority of North America and it’s basically a consortium of producers of braille and consumer organizations. ACB and NFB both have representation on there, and they basically set rules. Roberta went to the webinar, I only heard about it, and they have specific rules for now producing material for younger children, they have specific rules for producing crochet and knitting patterns, things like that, they really delve into the code.
Jeff:
Well that’s great, because just like anybody else, you know, you only learn what’s in front of you and if you’re learning the wrong way, I guess, it really helps. I thought it would be a big shift when they started switching things up, like how are they going to do this? But I really like that the methodology, the teaching that you’re doing with this book here, is you learn it all at once, one time.
Lori:
Right.
Jeff:
That’s really smart.
Lori:
We assume at the beginning of the book that you know the alphabet-
Roberta:
Right, and then we go on to the alphabet of word signs. And just to give you an example, the first set in the book starts with only three words, “Can,” “Do,” and “It.” The sentences to practice are “I can do it” “Can I do it,” that sort of sentence just using those four words, using the word capital I also in addition, and so it makes it really simple, and then there’s the next one that’s introduced is the word you, and it’s “Can you do it” and other sentences that have the word you in it. Makes it really easy for the kids to learn, for the students to learn, I should say, because as I said, they can be adults as well, it’s being used in the Lighthouse in San Francisco with adults
Jeff:
That’s great, right away I’m sitting here going C, D, Y, X.
Lori and Roberta:
That’s right!
Jeff:
I’m doing good, I’m gonna get a star today, I like it.
Lori:
Yeah!
Roberta:
Jeff, are you reading UEB braille or are you concerned about it?
Jeff:
I don’t read enough braille to really make a difference right now, but I should, as soon as you brought this up I’m interested and now I see that I can just get the book and incorporate it as I’m going in, I don’t have to reinterpret, anything like that, so I really like too that it’s for teachers, for parents, anybody, everybody, you’re very inclusive with this book because there’s usually no one learner just sitting alone reading the book but you can be, but now that there’s availability for teachers or multiple teachers to be working with you, it’s self explanatory. I think that’s a great idea.
Roberta:
And it’s also being used in remote learning with people who are doing distance learning where the teacher’s in her home, his or her home and the student’s in their home, they take the braille book and work at home and the teacher works with them via Zoom from their own home, that’s it, that’s all the materials that you need, the braille book and the print book, or the braille teacher’s edition,
Jeff:
I just realized, I did it wrong. I said C, D, Y, X, it should have been C, Y, D, X. I just want to make sure my star is still shining.
Roberta:
Jeff, you’re right! I also want to tell you that as far as the literary part, it’s only nine changes in the literary part in terms of going from eBay braille which is what you learned to UEB which is being learned now. So, one of those changes, and I think this is a great change is that there’s no more coddling of words, meaning the “and” and “for” cannot be put together anymore, there has to be a space in between. And I think that’s great for braille learners because I remember one of my students could not get used to that, he always put a space in, and I would always have to say to him no, you need to not space between, and it didn’t make sense. And this way, it follows [unintelligible] there’s a space, there’s a space, there’s no, and for, and the, there’s no such thing, so that’s, you know, part of the chain.
Lori:
I also just want to say like for example we used to contract the word “to” T-O, like if you wrote “into it” they would all be attached, and that no longer occurs, it does really follow the print equivalent. And I remember being a younger child and thinking like okay, you know, now that I’m on a typewriter I have to space before I write the word “it,” but “in to” still get attached to each other.
Jeff:
There’s a famous English movie that’s a romance, I forget who the guy was, he has this long walk across a field and a lot of girls like it and stuff, so I decided well I’m gonna read that book and I got it and “neighbor” had B-O-U-R or “labor” was spelled a little differently. I was just learning Braille at the time and it was like, I was so confused, I had to slow down because the English word spellings like “colour-”
Lori:
British spelling.
Jeff:
It just threw me for a loop, like what is this word? I had no idea because I would never spell it that way and now it sounds like, oh, England, thank you.
Lori
Yeah, and also in England previously they did not use the capital sign at the beginning of the sentence to save space. I remember being a child and getting a braille book and saying like, to my mother, why are the first words in these sentences not capitals, and my mother’s like, what are you talking about, they are so, and I’m like, no, they’re not, you know.
Jeff:
Here’s the dot six.
Lori:
Yeah.
Jeff:
So, Lori, in your line of work, how do you utilize braille, how do you find it most practical?
Lori:
Braille is so essential. I use braille for note-taking, I use braille for keeping track of material that I have to refer to, phone numbers, statistical information, things like that. It’s used in my employment on a regular basis, and really without braille just using speech, it’s much more cumbersome for me. I think, you know, when people get rushed through rehabilitation at times as a newly blind person as an adult, they’re not given the time to learn braille adequately. People need support and they need fun things to read and fun things to do with braille to help reinforce that they can read as a blind person.
Jeff:
A teacher told us, when I first went blind, she said, what was the last book you read, and I read this one book and she said well, order that book. And so I ordered the book and all of a sudden these boxes show up at my front door, it’s like whoa, someone’s moving in, you know, but it was- I kind of had an inkling of the storyline so I was like leaning into it, oh, this is this part, yeah, you know? She also said to me, get some Dr Seuss books or something, you know, it’s something that you know, and I started doing that. It was really neat to have a teacher that inspired me to, you know, get going on something that wasn’t so foreign like that English book.
Roberta:
I would like to say one other thing Lori reminded me of, when she was going from reading in braille to writing in braille on a typewriter. This book is also really useful throughout any student’s school years, from really first grade through high school, because it can be used- if you’re reading the braille, you can have a student read the braille sentence, and type it, or use a computer to write it out, because they’ve got it written right in front of them, so they start at the beginning, they learn how to spell out all the braille contractions.
Jeff:
That’s great.
Roberta:
And then they can use it for computers, you know, it’s just got so many different uses, all throughout school.
Jeff:
That’s great. I think it’s a very useful tool. Roberta, how can people find out where to get this book?
Roberta:
On my website, which is www.actualtactuals, it’s A-C-T-U-A-L, tactual, T-A-C-T-U-A-L-S.com, that’s the website, actualtactuals.com, or if they want to write me and ask questions it’s actualtactuals@gmail.com, phone number’s 516-434-1506.
Jeff:
There you go.
Roberta:
Either Laurie or I will be able to answer questions for you. I know there’s one teacher out there who’s student just lost their vision at 19, and she’s trying to figure out which is the right material to use with that student. I’m willing to talk to you, I’m not trying to push the book, neither of us are.
Lori:
I guess the good thing is Roberta does have experience as a 30-year teacher of the visually impaired as well as a rehab teacher and prior to that she was transcribing, so she really gets the broad spectrum of the whole field.
Jeff:
I don’t blame you for pushing the book, I think it’s a great product, you know, like I said. You’ve explained all the way from teachers to parents to maybe even a sibling of someone, but you do have the sighted portion of it and then you do have the learning portion of it, so I think it covers the whole gauntlet of where it can be applied, who can use it. There’s something here for everyone. And it’s probably a parent’s dream to have it because, you know, like, Lori, your mom would have been able to look at the book and see, oh, there is no capital, but with this book they can actually explain it maybe in a way that they know their child best or something of that nature. So, I think you really got a great product here so I would push the book.
Roberta:
Don’t like that word, not comfortable with it. If you don’t want it you don’t need to get it! But Lori and I both feel really strongly that it can be used by anyone, and certainly for the older students like that 19-year-old who’s learning to read braille now, it’s not the little baby stories, it just gets right to the need of it.
Jeff:
Yeah, and I think people need to understand that there’s so many statistics that we could go into about employability and you know, reading braille, people who read braille and all that stuff, some people don’t think they need it because there’s audio books or they don’t need this, but I’ve seen people give speeches by just having notecards in their pocket or bringing up the braille and it’s a way of reading and talking where it’s harder to actually listen to something and talk, I mean, I’m just talking about practical uses for it. I’ve been in elevators where there’s so many buttons, even though I could read braille enough, I don’t find it very fast sometimes, the different layouts, but by the day I’m ready to leave that hotel I got it all figured out.
Lori:
That’s just because they have to put the elevator buttons low enough for the wheelchair users to reach the top floor and then when it’s a 50-story building, as a blind person, you’ve got to orient yourself first, and is it down towards my knees or up towards my chest, I got to figure out where everything is!
Jeff:
Meanwhile five other people came in and you’re still-
Lori:
That’s right, and they’re reaching over you to push the button.
Jeff:
I heard too that some people were trying to change how elevators work because of the pandemic, that they think that if you just hover over it a little bit, that that’ll activate it, so elevator companies were ready to change it but some people from the blindness community said, wait a second, we don’t hover, we can’t hover. We don’t know where we’re hovering.
Lori:
Similar to a destination elevator which would be a whole other podcast.
Jeff:
Yeah, I say just bring me home, James, you know, or something of that nature. That worked really great. So Lori, Roberta, is there anything else you want to share with the listeners?
Lori:
Thank you for your time and it was a pleasure!
Roberta:
I really appreciate your inviting us, thank you so much.
Jeff:
Well, I think you’ve really got a great product out there and we’ll put the links in the show notes and people can look down below since this might be on YouTube as well. This is a first. I never did Blind Abilities podcast on YouTube so thank you for inspiring this as well.
Lori:
Thank you!
Roberta:
Thank you, appreciate it.
Jeff:
Alright.
Pete:
We’d like to thank Roberta and Lori for joining Jeff in the Blind Abilities studio today. You can find out more about Roberta’s book Unified English Braille Practice Sentences on her website, that’s www.actualtactuals.com, and from all of us here at Blind Abilities, through these challenging times, to you, your family and friends, stay well, stay informed, and stay strong. Thank you so much for listening and have a great day.
[Music] [Transition noise] -When we share
-What we see
-Through each other’s eyes…
[Multiple voices overlapping, in unison, to form a single sentence]
…We can then begin to bridge the gap between the limited expectations, and the realities of Blind Abilities.
Jeff:
For more podcasts with a blindness perspective, check us out on the web at www.blindabilities.com, on Twitter @BlindAbilities, download our app from the app store, Blind Abilities, that’s two words, or send us an email at info@blindabilities.com. Thanks for listening.
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