Is Reading a Privilege?

Last week I had the pleasure of meeting with a few of our former students from Marshall High School. They are all attending colleges/universities in California this year, and have a fantastic idea of how to share their experiences of what life is like after high school if you're visually impaired. You'll hear more about their new community in a future post, but their group is called Survive or Thrive--keep your ear to the web for more information in the new couple of weeks.
While in conversation with Ann, Karen, Paola, and Raymond, they made mention of an essay that Ann had written about how important braille is in her academic life. I asked Ann if she would send me the essay, and after reading it, I asked for permission to share it with you here. Ann is a former student of mine who is now attending the University of
California Berkeley on a ten year scholarship from the Gates
Millennium Scholars Program. She is studying Psychology and is
considering a minor in Education. She plans to apply to graduate
school and eventually become a psychologist.
Read on as she very eloquently describes of her struggles to be afforded the same rights of accessibility as her print-reading peers in college. When you finish reading, go out and let people know how important braille is in your life if you are a braille reader. If you are a print reader, think about no longer having access to the printed word; not having easy access to books, even when surrounded by books in your local library or bookstore. Think of those moments when you quietly get lost in a story, or use a graph or image to help you understand some new concept. How important is the printed word to you?

Is Reading a Privilege?
by Ann Kwong

Have you ever considered whether reading something off a physical page is a right or a privilege? This question may not have occurred to individuals with sight because reading is an everyday activity. Reading is just a normal part of daily life; it is a natural right. People with sight go to a bookstore, purchase a book, and immediately open it begin to read. They can get the information off the page at exactly the same moment their eyes move over the words. Braille readers like me are denied this right. Unfortunately, I am deprived of the opportunity to read physical text, and it is now deemed a "privilege" to read Braille.

I am diagnosed with Leber's Congenital Amaurosis and other causes that accumulate to the overall condition of being labeled "legally blind." My world is composed mainly of touch. I do not read with print; my fingertips are a substitution for my eyes, and I perceive the world and obtain information using my hands.

I do not have the luxury to go into a bookstore and read any book I desire within seconds of purchase. Transcribing literature in to an accessible format is an extensive and tedious process. In order to physically read a textbook in Braille, the process begins many months before class. I first select my courses in advance, contact the professors to obtain a course syllabus and book list, purchase and pick up the print books from the bookstore, and deliver them to the Alternative Media Center. I must then patiently wait for the staff to scan, proofread, and finally upload the material on-line so I can download and read the textbooks. Just reciting the process alone causes anxiety and immense stress! The Alternative Media Center at UC Berkeley is short staffed, so it can take an entire month for the complete process; oftentimes, it is made more difficult when professors do not post book lists until one week before class begins.

If my textbooks consists of tables, graphics, scientific formulas, or other diagrams, the difficulty of obtaining the material in a physical format increases. Textbooks for English and history courses can be read using electronic formats, but subjects that involve diagrams and formulas such as Statistics requires physical Braille books in order to understand the concepts. Normally when I work on my assignments at home I use my Braillenote Apex. With the Apex, I can physically read the numbers in Braille on the Braille display, and I can calculate my math more efficiently. During examinations however Braille students are only permitted to use Freedom Scientific's computer screen reader Job Access Window's Software (JAWS.) This means I cannot physically read the exam and must instead rely on Jaws dictating it to me. When I attempt to find patterns, compute the correlation coefficient, or calculate standard deviations for a long data set, it is frustrating to have to base everything solely on listening and memory. If I would like to find the original numbers to calculate standard deviations, I must navigate word by word or number by number with JAWS to find the original list. With the Braillenote, I can scroll back quicker to find relevant information. How I long to just read with my fingers and find the pertinent information I need expediently; these are the times when I am strongly convinced that I should have the same right of reading text off a page as my sighted counterparts. Print users can quickly draw tables and skim down or across columns and rows to obtain relevant information while visually impaired JAWS users have to listen to the entire list of numbers before finding the necessary ones. It is exceedingly time consuming to do so. Often times blind students like me are forced to rely completely on auditory aids meaning that we do not have a system of written record to help us organize information placing us at a huge disadvantage. I have tried again and again to explain my situation, but proctoring services at Berkeley are extremely inflexible and do not listen to the needs of the students. Proctoring services have also postponed my exams are many occasions, resulting in other exams on the class syllabus to be delayed, inconvenience, and frustration to the student and professor. Proctoring is unwilling to negotiate causing many students and even some professors to believe that they should just avoid the service altogether. Stresses for exams are doubled; besides worrying about knowing the material, I must consider when and how I will take the exam.

The screen reader itself is also limited in many ways. JAWS does not read certain math symbols such as delta, sigma, mu, etc. Thus I cannot read statistics formulas from my textbook. Rather than giving me insight into the world of mathematics, the limited information I do obtain flusters me because my questions are not answered. When I use the keyboard to scroll down and read with JAWS, it will say "blank" when it lands on a mathematical formula even though the notation is displayed on the screen. More complex figures are also unreadable with JAWS.

It is crucial that Braille readers are given the same opportunities to read. Reading tangible text is such a fundamental right; however, for visually impaired people it has become a rare "privilege." This right that we are deprived of is a source of inconvenience and is detremental to having a good grade; action must be taken to alter such norms. If visually impaired students do not advocate for Braille literacy and stress its significance, Braille will soon become obsolete and only a medium used in the past.


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