(Published in the Spring 2006 issue of the Foundation Focus, the newsletter of the Foundation for Blind Children, Phoenix, Arizona.))
It’s 9 o'clock the night before math class. Gina is sitting in her living room, doing homework. She reads each problem from the brailled textbook and enters her calculations and problem answers into her braille notetaker. When she is finished, Gina attaches her braille notetaker to her print printer and generates a printout of her work, which is now ready to be turned in to her instructor.
For Gina, a teaching assistant of 30 years in the Foundation for Blind Children’s Co-Operative Preschool, this was a new scenario, when she had to take a pre-algebra class for the completion of an associate degree at a local community college. Gina used the BrailleNote as a note-taking device in class, for doing homework, and for taking tests. By setting the device to eight-dot computer braille and following a few simple notational conventions, Gina was able to prepare her answers to homework and test problems in a form that her instructor could read without back-translation. Although braille notetakers have gradually become more and more widespread in educational settings, they have typically not been used for math and science, as their benefits in those subject areas have not been recognized.
How did it work?
The BrailleNote was set up to allow both keyboard input and braille display output in eight-dot computer braille. These settings are available in the device’s options menu. The use of eight-dot braille allowed Gina to write in such a way that each braille character corresponded to one print character. Braille contractions were not used; letters were capitalized by adding dot 7 to the standard six-dot combination of the lower case letters, so that braille and print took up an equal amount of characters; numbers were dropped to the lower part of the six-dot cell, as is familiar from the Nemeth and Computer Braille Codes, avoiding the extra space for the number sign.
This approach worked smoothly for Gina because it gave her greater independence than the traditional method would have given her. Not only did it provide her with greater control over her own work, allowing her instructor to read in print what she had brailled. Gina didn't need to worry about the extra step of coordinating back translation of her work into print.
For more information on this process, contact Inge Durre at the Arizona Instructional Resource Center of the Foundation for Blind Children.