Surviving public school as a blind girl in 1955

I’m a totally blind individual who graduated high school in the United States in 2004. I was fortunate that I grew up just as assistive technology was becoming widely available and fairly easy to use. In 1955 a translator would have to spend a lot of time learning to read and write braille. They would then have to read a print book and manually retype it in braille. Given this it’s understandable why Braille was not something that was pushed in the public school system. By the time I started school anyone with basic computer literacy could scan in a book, open the file in a translation program and print a braille copy out using a braille embosser. While this technology isn’t cheap I was fortunate enough to go to a school that could afford it as well as having parents who advocated for me.

I think some of the issues this person had were caused by having some vision. Because I’m totally blind it’s pretty clear that print won’t do me any good and major accommodations have to be made. When you have some vision it’s difficult for others to understand what you can and can’t do, especially if that changes as your vision gets worse.

I have an issue with the only 10% of legally blind people can read braille statistic because it is not made clear what the population of legally blind people consists of. Often times being blind is in addition to severe mental handicaps. If someone can’t use the bathroom on their own then learning to read books is low on the list of things that are important. In addition braille may not make sense to elderly people who recently lost their vision. If their fingers are no longer sensitive enough to read braille then should they still count in the statistic? Older people who have lost their vision also have prior experience reading print material. This means that with the prevalence of text to speech software it may not be worth learning braille if they already know how words are spelled and how to construct a sentence.

Schools - public schools anyway - seem to stumble the most with accommodating children with disability. No one wants to deal with it. Sometimes budgets and staffing get blamed, but most often it seems to just boil down to people being forced out of their comfort zone and not wanting to deal with the "tards". Happily the societal trend seems to be toward inclusion. Progress is just very slow, with parents (and students) fighting for it every day.

I remember when I was learning web development how "Accessibility" was kind of a feature to enhance your product. I wonder if anyone even considers it these days. Seems like the mad rush to push out a barely-working product would leave people with disabilities on the sidelines.

"Nowadays, we have the digital tools to make information available to people with vision loss almost instantaneously."

No, we can't let the Kindle read books aloud with text-to-speech; it'll deprive publishers of audiobook revenue!

I don't buy the claim that the Web is 80% inaccessible. Does anyone have a citation for that study?

If you want to know more about what it's like for a blind person read "Do You Remember the Color Blue?" by Sally Hobart Alexander.

It's aimed at children, but I found it interesting.