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Regarding “SDAB Leads the Way ...”
I read with a great deal of interest the article in “The Braille Forum” concerning “SDAB Leads the Way in Preserving Separate State Agency for the Blind in South Dakota.”
My late husband, Howard H. Hanson, was the director of the department for 25 years. Under his leadership, South Dakota was in the top 10 of rehabilitation and job placement of blind people per 100,000 population in the United States. Hanson was very concerned about keeping that department separate from other rehabilitation agencies. His reasoning was that it is easier to rehabilitate other people than blind people. Rehabilitation agencies work on numbers. Counselors in rehabilitation agencies are asked to produce. The more people going into work situations, the better the statistics. It is more difficult to rehabilitate and place those with blindness than others with different disabilities.
Let us be honest; most people have not had occasion or opportunity to be acquainted with someone who is blind. When someone meets a blind person, they frequently do not quite know how to act. Howard and I saw it many times.
— Phyllis Hanson Tolstedt, Little Rock, Ark.
Regarding the NFB
As a reader of “The Braille Forum” for over 30 years, it is distressing to note that NFB’s hostile antics continue to irritate.
The May 2000 issue of your fine publication includes the following summary of President Paul Edwards’ report during the midyear board meeting: “Edwards began by describing his concern about chronic fragmentation within the blindness community, and the continued inability of that community and its leaders to deal effectively with certain predictable and obstructive actions by the National Federation of the Blind. ‘When the NFB repeatedly makes consensus development impossible to achieve, at some point, leaders in our community will have to convey to them ... that such continuing conduct is simply inappropriate and is injuring the best interest of all blind people,’ Edwards said.”
The damage NFB inflicts covers the entire blindness landscape, including public policy formation, the health of specialized agencies and schools, the commitment of professional workers, and public perceptions and attitudes. It leaves the field poorly equipped to face the challenges of the day.
Almost 20 years ago, after the NFB had conducted a relentless campaign to “control or destroy” the National Accreditation Council for Agencies Serving the Blind and Visually Handicapped (NAC), many leaders in the field declared that the opposition of NFB’s national leadership to standards and accreditation was injurious to the best interests of blind and visually impaired people nationwide.
The stage was finally set to isolate NFB’s leadership, to condemn its unethical fundraising practices and its undemocratic governance, and to expose it to public scrutiny and contempt. But then, as now, it proved impossible to overcome the chronic fragmentation among the responsible leadership elements. Several well-intentioned leaders opted for appeasement rather than confrontation, futilely attempting to negotiate with the NFB leadership. As a result, the coalition dissolved and NAC was left exposed and vulnerable.
At the end of the last century, the western coalition finally succeeded in “winning” the Cold War against godless communism. Is it too much to hope that the battle against the destructive NFB leadership can be won in this new century?
— Richard W. Bleecker, Jersey City, N.J.
Regarding All-Caps
I am writing in reference to “A Case for All-Caps” (February 2000). I am legally blind due to macular degeneration. It is my opinion that material printed in all-caps is not easier to read.
While it seems rather obviously true that a person with low vision can see capital letters more easily than lower-case letters of the same point size, when words are formed of ALL-CAPS, they are not easier to read. ALL-CAPS format destroys the “shapes” of words, shapes that have become so familiar over an entire lifetime of reading. Also, ALL-CAPS is more difficult to see and read simply because 99 percent of what we normally read is not printed in that format.
Both size and shape are important factors when we consider single letters as opposed to words formed of several letters. For example, it seems to me that, if all sizes of characters remain fixed, the Snellen eye test chart would become more difficult to read if all of the single letters were replaced by words. I believe I recognize “E” more easily than a word, like “EYES.”
As a final thought, I recently received a letter written in ALL-CAPS, and found it rather difficult to read on my CCTV. Also, if my memory serves me right, “Hoosier Highlights,” the quarterly newsletter of the Special Service Division of the Indiana State Library, used ALL-CAPS for a while, then returned to standard print.
Thank you for the opportunity to express my opinion.
— Verne R. Sanford, Valparaiso, Ind.
You smartly asked in the February issue what other low-vision readers thought about Larry Harper’s “Case for All-Caps.”
At your prompting I have now queried other partially sighted print readers, and every one of them agrees with me that a mix of upper- and lower-case characters is more legible than the all-caps approach espoused by Harper. Published research confirms our judgment too, and the finding is easily demonstrated. Examples are instructive. Just envision two place names with the same number of letters and the same size both in height and length. When displayed in all-caps, their shapes are virtually identical too. Alas, when presented in mixed case, their shapes are distinctively different. The place names are Hummingbird Lane and Hensonscove Road. A low-vision reader might need to distinguish between these two names with a magnifying glass pressed against a bus timetable, squinting up at a rail station’s train board, or aiming a handheld telescope at a street sign. After the initial capital “H,” the subsequent silhouette becomes significantly different thanks to the configuring positions of particular lower-case characters which “act up” like the “b” and “d” or dangle down like the “g.”
Comparison of two-letter prepositions which occur frequently in text yields additional evidence. “By,” “at” and “in” have distinctively different shapes only in lower case. In all-caps they present very similar geometry. Further, I trust Mr. Harper will acknowledge, “by” gets taller in lower case than in caps.
— Ken Stewart, Warwick, N.Y.
For all my anti-uppercase fans,
Did you all know that when you finger-spell in the palm of a deaf-blind person’s hand, you should always use all-caps?
— Larry Harper, Milwaukie, Ore.