BLIND STUDENTS AND BRAILLE

   

      Do you imagine yourself a blind person?

      Some will say that is horrible, others will say that it is unthinkable to live without seeing; the truth is that you can live without the use of your eyes but your life will be a bit more complicated.

      First of all I would like to distiguish between people who can see forms, shadows and light and  people who can't see a thing at all  and that makes adifference while walking in the street or trying to make your way home. However, at school  these differences are not significant since these formas  and shadows can't allow them to read and write in a proper way.

       As you all know, blind people can read braille. The problem is that reading in this way is slower and since it is a sequential way of  decoding the signs, you can't take advantage of visual strategies as  the sighted people do.

       While reading, a word is often recognised before decoding all the letters because we are seeing it, its form, its length, its endings...

      

       We could say that you "guess" what word is being read and what's more, the longer is the word, the more we guess, and the probability to get it right increases. By contrast, a  person  reading in  braille needs more time to decode all the signs. 

       But the worst of all is mathematics. Do you imagine a complicated formula which needs to be simplified? 

       If you can see it, you will take an eye at it and easily discover where a bracket starts and ends. If you can't see, you must decode all the formula and "to rememeber it" in order to  take a decision  of where to start the simplification.

Warning: this does not correspond to the formula above.

        Conclusion. 

        We need to be tolerant with our blind students, and  give them more time to do an exercice or a reading, since  their reading method is slower and can't allow the extra aid of visual "guessing".