^ This exactly. As frustrating and problematic as it is when boomers shake their heads and say things like “it doesn’t count if you only read the audiobook,” there is something very real to be said for the fact that listening is not, on a fundamental technical level, the same as reading. This argument comes up time and time again between parents who know their blind kids should be getting braille instruction and abled special educators who think that braille is obsolete and that they will be fine by just listening to screen readers and audiobooks.
Braille provides meaningful access to true genuine literacy in a way that listening simply cannot do, and certainly not in a way that is just as efficient and effective as braille. I will explain a couple of reasons why:
First of all, in blindness spaces, physically reading with your eyes or your hands can often be thought of as active reading, while listening to something can be thought of as passive passive reading. Active reading is much more effective in helping you actually comprehend and retain information as compared to passive listening. This is because in order to read with your eyes or your hands, you have to physically engage your body in the act of reading. You have to physically move your eyes or your fingers from letter to letter and expend actual focus on making out letters and taking in words. If you get distracted and stop moving, the information stops coming in. You may still get distracted and actively read without paying enough attention to comprehend, but it’s much more engaging than passive reading.
However, if you are simply listening to audio, that information is going to keep playing whether or not you are actively engaging with it or paying full attention. It is way easier to mentally fade in and out while a screen reader keeps going or a recording keep playing, because you are not actively seeking out the information but are rather passively allowing it to wash over you.
And, with active reading, you can be constantly adjusting the speed at which you are reading in subtle ways in order to slow down to comprehend a certain section or speed up through parts that don’t take as much work to take in. Technically, you could do this with a screen reader or an audiobook, but it would be cumbersome because you have to continuously interrupt the flow of information to rewind and slow down or speed up. Breaking the flow makes it even harder to stay focused and actually take in the information you are reading.
It is the difference between being an active participant versus being a passive audience.
Additionally, it is 100,000,000 times harder to learn how to write if you are listening rather than properly reading. I’m not talking about character development or narrative elements though, I’m talking about the literal technical parts of writing out a sentence. If you hardly ever get to actually put your hands on actual pieces of writing, it can be incredibly difficult to know when to use a period versus when to use a comma. Heck, some of my actual real life blind friends today still struggle to remember to use question marks when writing out things like rhetorical questions because their educators gave them little to no access to Braille and taught them to use nothing but audio. Plus, all of that doesn’t even get into more advanced punctuation like semicolons and em dashes.
If you are only using audio, it can also be incredibly difficult to learn when it is appropriate to insert a paragraph break. That is an incredibly crucial skill, not just for your own purposes, but for the purposes of accommodating others. Yes, blind people require our own accommodations, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t also want to be able to accommodate other groups, such as people with visual processing disorders or ADHD or other disabilities that might make it hard to parse through huge paragraphs of plain text. I actually have ADHD on top of my blindness, so smaller paragraphs help me in both Braille AND screen reader use.
Many screen readers do have a function where you can read paragraph by paragraph rather than letting it read the whole page in one long go, but that isn’t enough of a learning tool. For starters, sometimes a document or a webpage is not marked up in a way that signifies paragraph changes accurately to a screen reading software, so we might not be hearing things broken into the correct paragraphs that are actually displayed visually on screen. And secondly, reading paragraph by paragraph is not always the most efficient method of reading with a screen reader, so there are fewer opportunities for a blind person to read it that way in order to gain exposure to more examples of proper paragraph break placement.
Reading with audio only also doesn’t allow you to get a very clear idea of when to use things like capitalization or italics. Many blind people do at least get taught pretty thoroughly that you are supposed to capitalize the first letter of each sentence and the first letter of a name, but it can be a lot more complex than that. It is important to be able to know which words of a title get capitalization, such as the letter A, and which words don’t, such as “the,” unless “the” is at the beginning of the title.
It can also be hard with only audio to grasp that italics or bolding or even underlining can sometimes be used to add emphasis to certain words, and even harder to figure out which of those will suit the kind of emphasis you want to create in a given situation and how often it is appropriate to use any of those methods of formatting emphasis. Not to mention technical uses of those things such as using italics versus quotation marks around different types of titles for different types of media. Sure, you might get taught a number of those things in writing classes, but without actually seeing/experiencing them first hand in the everyday world around you, it can be so much harder to remember.
This is another situation where, yes, technically a screen reader can tell you whether something is bolded or italicize, and some screen readers will read out quotation marks, but it is cumbersome, and you often have to go deliberately checking each word manually. This is because, if the screen reader threw in notes like “italicized“ or “underlined“ after phrases that had those features in the middle of a sentence or paragraph, that interrupts the flow of whatever you were reading and makes it harder to actually focus on the actual information being conveyed and processed it effectively. Put simply, it’s distracting.
And, of course, on a final note, it is next to impossible to learn proper spelling by only listening. That may not be so much the case in some other languages that are much more unified in phonetics and which letters can be used to create which sounds, but at least in English, there are dozens of ways to create the same exact sounds through different spellings. If most of your exposure to those words is auditory, you might have no idea whether to use an F or a PH, an S or a C, CH or CK, SI or PSY, and on and on and on. That doesn’t even get into the shit show that is our uses of OU and GH. If the word “psychology” is a challenge, imagine how hard that makes it to know weather to use through versus threw or there verses they’re versus their.
Yes, you could technically teach every single one of these things to a blind person, even while only giving them access to audio forms of reading, but it would be much, much harder to understand and actually retain. It becomes a process of brute force memorization, rather than something that feels natural because you see it around you every day just by the nature of your reading medium allowing you to access those things. Seeing them constantly helps your brain form those patterns even if you aren’t consciously paying attention to them, which makes it so much easier to remember and implicitly know how to do those things without having to go and look it up or take intense notes on it.
Braille solves every single one of these problems for most blind people. It is active reading because you are actively moving your hands from letter to letter and line to line, it allows you to manually adjust your reading speed smoothly and often without you even noticing you’re doing it without breaking the flow of information, it allows you to regularly encounter and understand proper indentation in paragraph breaks, it exposes you to all forms of punctuation both rudimentary and advanced, it gives you access to information like italics and underlining, and it enables you to be exposed to the way each individual word is spelled. All of these things not only enable you to better comprehend and retain the information, but they also enable you to learn how to implement them when writing, yourself.
Plus, if you’ve ever seen those studies that talk about how much better we comprehend and retain information when we read it on physical paper versus reading it on a screen, there are reasons for that. I won’t get into all of them here because I am not an expert on generalized literacy, but part of the reason for that is because on a screen, the words move around, so you don’t have as much spatial context to anchor them to to help you remember them in your mind when trying to recall information.
When you are reading physical pages, all of the little physical spatial contextual elements about that reading experience give your brain more details to latch onto when trying to remember something. You might remember that one piece of information was near the bottom of the left page, which can help you mentally flip back to when you were at the bottom of that left page. Braille—or at least physical paper Braille—has those same benefits of giving your brain more physical spatial context clues to anchor the memory to, which can help you more easily remember it. Audio reading, on the other hand, can’t do that. There are no physical or spatial anchors to provide context clues for recall, which makes it harder to retain information and access it again later on.
Unfortunately, most of the blindness field is heavily dominated by sighted people who have very little first-hand experience with blindness in their own lives and certainly have never been blind themselves, so there is a serious epidemic of sighted blindness professionals who do not understand how inscrutably necessary braille is. Many of those professionals will write off braille as obsolete and old-fashioned, which is anything but true.
Currently, in the US, less than 10% of all blind kids on average ever receive any braille instruction at all, which is frankly disturbing. Blind advocates have fought tooth and nail to make more stringent requirements for teaching braille to blind students to ensure they get true opportunities at true literacy, and we have made progress, but there is still so much pushback from this largely abled community of professionals that often hold decades old ideas rooted in ableism. Many of them even think that braille is just fundamentally and innately difficult to learn, which is laughable on several levels. I will make a separate post at some point about why braille can actually be much easier to learn than print, but not today.
So yes, braille is in fact an extremely crucial part of true literacy for blind people, and there is in fact a serious decline in braille instruction due to the rise of the belief that screen readers and audiobooks are an adequate replacement for it.
I think many blind people who grew up in the current age and simply memorized the keyboard might think that a braille keyboard would be weird at first, but personally, I am in full support of the idea of braille as a more common feature on computer keyboards. Disabled people shouldn’t have to memorize things that abled people don’t. It would probably help many blind people learn where each key is much more quickly, and it would be excellent for blind people who also have other disabilities that might impact things like memory. Plus, as mentioned above, it might even serve as a convenient way for sighted people to keep track of where their own hands are, too. Accessibility features often end up helping everybody, not just disabled people. Braille on keyboards may also be counterproductive for some people like people with sensory sensitivities, so I wouldn’t necessarily require it, but it has potential to help a great many people if it was at least fairly common.
(Unfortunately though, as a sidenote, braille is not usually helpful as an alternative reading medium if you have dyslexia. Dyslexia is a language disability, not a visual one, so you are likely going to be just as dyslexic when reading braille as you would be reading print. Blind people can be dyslexic for this reason, too.)
