IN 1970 more than half of blind American schoolchildren could read Braille. Now, only about 10% can. That decline is mostly a consequence of a change of policy, otherwise welcome, which means that the blind are taught, as far as possible, alongside their sighted peers. Since most people in a class of both the sighted and the blind will have no use for Braille, and most teachers no knowledge of it, its neglect is hard to avoid. Moreover, as the number of those who can read Braille declines, so does demand for books written in it. That, in turn, means fewer such books are being embossed—reducing yet further any incentive to learn the system in the first place. Louis Braille’s patterns of raised dots, detectable by the fingertips and used to signify letters, numerals, punctuation marks, musical notation and mathematical symbols, which he invented in 1821, may be on the way out.
In a world of recorded sound, text-to-voice translators and voice-activated software, the withering of Braille might not be thought to matter much. But it does. Only a quarter of blind Americans of working age...
from The Economist: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1SrBZMx
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