You know the visually impaired “read” by touching and identifying a system of raised dots called Braille, but do you know how Braille is written?
January 4 was World Braille Day, and the Workshop for the Blind in LB Block held a competition among the visually impaired to see who could “write” the best in Braille.
Braille is a tactile writing system. It’s not another language but more like a code that can be used to write any language. For this contest, the participants were dictated a passage in English and Bengali that they had to convert to Braille.
They used thick paper, a “slate”, and a stylus. The slate had rectangular “windows” to guide the writer and the stylus had a sharp nib to poke and punch holes into the paper with the codes.
More than 20 participants had come for the contest from all over. One such was Prasun Saha wrote Braille in English and Bengali. “I’ve read books in Braille but I depend overwhelmingly on technology to keep abreast with current affairs. My phone has an app that converts PDF formats of e-newspapers from text to speech so I listen to The Telegraph newspaper every day,” smiled Saha, who has completed his special B.Ed and now teaches at Ramakrishna Mission Blind Boys Academy in Narendrapur.
Meghnath Mondal added that the way sighted people jot down information in diaries, the visually impaired use pocket guides to write in Braille on the go. “We use audio books and the like, but we don’t learn spellings of words unless we read them in Braille, and without that, we cannot write correct Braille either,” said the man who teaches computers at the Workshop.
In special schools, visually impaired students study subjects in Braille. But writing Braille takes up more time and space. “The text that would take one page of handwriting would take three pages in Braille,” said Mondal. “This is why for Board exams we use writers, who are students of a lower class than us, to write the answers we dictate. Also, in the workforce, we have to compete with sighted candidates so the computers we use are regular. Universally, keyboards have a raised dash on the letter F and J, so visually impaired typists have markers.”
The text for the dictation was being read out in Braille by Sujit Karmakar and Prabir Kumar Dhali, themselves visually impaired. They narrated the story of Louis Braille, the visually-impaired educator who invented the system.
Brinda Sarkar