by Cara Dunne-Yates
(Reprinted with permission from NAPVI “Awareness,” spring 2001.)
December 1978
“Now, children, who wants to play the innkeeper?” boomed the principal, as copies of the Christmas play were passed out to the eager throng of third, fourth and fifth graders. This impromptu play was the surprise grand finale of our school’s Christmas program, and no one had known about it. I bit my lip and held back the tears that were threatening to burst forth. As three sleek printed pages were thrust into my hands, the tears hardened into bitter fury. I wanted to squeeze those printed pages into a ball and hurl them at the principal! Wasn’t I one of the top readers, scoring above my peers on tests and academic performance? Wasn’t I in all the top reading groups, spelling bee championships and essay contests? Yet the words on the pages before me left me no choice but to stand mute and non-participating. They meant as much to me as the Japanese characters etched on the backs of Sony radios mean to most Americans. Why had they done this to me? My teachers knew that if I had my assignments ahead of time, I could, and always did, take them to the resource teacher who would translate them into braille. But that took time, and this was a surprise!
“I’ll tell you the lines so you can raise your hand and be the innkeeper,” whispered a little girl beside me. “No, she can be one of the sheep, then she won’t have to read any lines,” offered another well-meaning child. Yes, I could listen, but I couldn’t really participate; couldn’t really lose myself in the flow of lines, the rhythm of a script, the musical ebbs and flows of a well-loved story. How could they understand?
And then, like magic, a pair of high-heeled shoes came click-clacking down the aisle beside me and a hurried pair of hands slid a sheaf of brailled pages into my lap. “Here is your script. I’m sorry I’m late,” said my angelic resource teacher and then hurried off. My heart bounced with joy, and my fingers flew across the pages to locate the character list and the beginning of the script. Once again, I was just one of the kids at a public elementary school who now had the chance to be more than a sheep.
September 1994
So many intervening years and yet the scene felt strikingly familiar. With pounding heart and a lump of nervous anticipation gnawing at my stomach, I slipped into the first seat I detected as empty. It was the first class, the first day of law school. “Have I made all the necessary preparations?” I kept asking myself. I’d written all the letters ahead of time, determined and ordered the taped textbooks, spoken with all the professors, printed out my syllabi in braille and taken notes on the week’s first assignment. A hush fell over the assembled students as the professor commenced his introductory comments. He was abruptly interrupted by a pounding on the door. “Is there a Scott Garrett in this room?” boomed an indignant sounding voice. “Oh,” a startled student not far from me gasped. “Y-yes, I’m him.” “Scott Garrett? You are served. Here is your summons.” A flutter of paper signaled the transaction. For a startled moment, the class must have wondered whether or not this was real. We soon understood it was part of the first day’s regimen. “Class, I’ll be passing out copies of the summons, a packet of material describing the charges against Mr. Garrett, and some supplementary notes to help you as you investigate the incident,” the professor explained. This impromptu session would involve the class reviewing the new material and developing an attorney-client interview.
As a chunk of printed pages slid into my hands, I felt that sinking, frustrated feeling that made me want to bite my lip and squeeze back the same tears that had once plagued the heart of a third-grader in a Christmas play. Different scene, but was it not the same scenario? Hadn’t I prepared for the semester with due diligence? “I can read it to you quickly,” said a woman beside me. Again, the ebb and flow of ideas, facts and issues would only be partly complete if I had to hold all that information in my mind. Just as it had all those years ago, the frustration melted rapidly into bitter fury. Why hadn’t I been warned about this obvious need to get those materials in braille? My first day of law school and I was already going to feel at a disadvantage, watching that comprehension gap stretch between me and my classmates. My medium of communication and information input had been downgraded to a secondary source.
“Give this to her,” I heard the professor’s voice at the far end of the row. Passed from hand to hand, a thick sheaf of brailled pages came sliding down the table to me. My mouth fell open. I’d talked to this very professor last week, and he hadn’t handed me a computer diskette to print out containing this unexpected material. Where had it come from? “Well, is it acceptable? I don’t know braille, you know. I just went into your computer lab and followed the instructions on using the braille printer. So, is it OK?” He stood there, waiting for my nod of approval. Still open-mouthed, I nodded, hardly looking at it.
Since fourth grade, I’d been taught to typewrite most of my assignments so my sighted teachers could read them. It was hammered into my young mind that if I wanted something in braille, I would have to plan ahead: ask for printed assignments a week before they were due, then deliver them to the resource teacher or call requests in to the National Library Service. It took time and forethought. Now, here was a law school professor — one of those individuals often accused of foisting demi-god status over students — taking up the task of making my world accessible. “Mr. Garrett, on what date did you purchase the boat in question?” I confidently intoned. Once again, I was just another first-year law student participating in a routine classroom exercise.
For such an avid advocate of braille, so voracious a reader of anything I can get my hands on, what a remarkable notion that the beginning of my relationship with braille was paved with bumps. The slow loss of vision during my fourth and fifth years of life caused the reversal of the original plan to teach me to read large print. Yearning to read the printed words that my sighted friends were learning, I decided to pretend that I could see. I memorized nursery rhymes and fairy tales, held printed books in front of my face and recited lines from memory. Many adults were fooled. But there was a problem. I was dying to delve back into the fantasyscape of books and stories, to lose myself in literature. The only way to do that was to let my fingers feed me the images and ideas. Well, if I hid the braille so that no one could see it, then, maybe, I would allow myself to read it. I hid books inside my desk and stuck my hands in between the pages, hoping no one would notice, while keeping the printed textbook open on my desk. This was slow and laborious, and I was getting frustrated.
By second grade, the book came out of the desk and lay closed on my lap while I snuck my hand in to read. By third grade, the book was fully opened across my lap, and the shame was gone. For the sighted classmates, the novelty of the way I read had long since worn off, and they asked no more questions. In fact, so vigorously had my love of reading developed since kindergarten, that once, in first grade, I decided that all other school subjects were useless and that I would be happy reading books all day. So one day for about two hours, I crawled into the small bookshelf that housed the few brailled volumes my public school resource room contained and hid from the teacher and read books.
As the years wore on, the quantity of texts available in braille decreased, and I began to rely on taped books and my friends or my mother as readers. By my first two years of college, often the only braille I ever got to read was that which I reproduced myself, based on notes from taped books or rough drafts and papers, which I then completed via typewriter.
My undergraduate college experiences were filled with amusing anecdotes about how an elite academic environment is ill-equipped and often insensitive to the communication potential of a medium like braille. I was told by a college dean during the fall of my sophomore year, “I’ve heard that braille was going out of style, so we’ve ordered your statistics textbooks on tape.” I asked him whether he’d ever attempted to balance his checkbook by having it read to him and then dictating his responses. Better yet, could he mentally visualize the size and scale of the supply and demand curve, the regression lines and the pie charts upon which my answers to statistics problem sets were to be based?
Once an exam proctor, while reading me a microeconomics exam, confessed that she had no idea what some of the mathematical symbols were. I exhorted her to fetch the registrar for consultation. “Well, I’ll just describe the symbols to you, and you can figure out what they are.” I patiently explained that printed math symbols mean little to me. “If you’ve gotten this far in college, I should think you would know what these math symbols are,” she fumed, before I lost patience and crashed out of the room to fetch the registrar myself.
My experiences with Japanese were much more rewarding. As the professors knew little or nothing about the Japanese braille system, I invented my own phonetic braille system and copied and memorized my lessons while they were read to me. Later, while living in Japan, I would memorize the 52-character Japanese braille system.
It was during my sophomore year in college that I had my first opportunity to visit a braille library — the Perkins Library in Watertown, Mass. “So this is a braille library?” I gushed in wide-eyed wonder at the room filled with shelves of bulky tactile volumes. Like someone from the tropics experiencing their first snowfall, there was a choked feeling in my throat as I wandered up one aisle, down the next. At first, all I could do was stroke the massive bindings protruding from the shelves. Flashbacks of wandering the public school library, stroking the shiny jackets of printed books engulfed my mind. I used to pull those shiny-jacketed volumes out just to hold them, feel their weight, and imagine that, one day, they would all magically convert into the bulky-bound volumes that would allow my fingers to guide me into the mystery worlds nestled within their pages. Now, here was the world of magic, knowledge, and information that had eluded me. I tore piles of books off shelves and let them spill around me with avalanche-like furor. I didn’t even want to read them. I just wanted to feel their presence.
When the world of technology opened itself up to me in law school, I had two new items of joy and wonder: a braille printer and an electronic braille display. The head-rattling banter of synthetic speech converted miraculously into an interactive channel of direct communication through these two devices. As in that childlike frenzied panic of joy I’d felt at the Perkins Library, I pumped all of my computer diskettes into the computer and printed everything out. As a writer, I’d been producing articles and stories for years. Now, I could read my own writing, feel its meter and rhythm, disagree with or smile at the images that seemed fresh and different now that my mind was taking them up directly through the “eyes” at my fingertips. I printed out everything I could get my hands on, just to “see” its shape. Finally, someone in the technology lab suggested that I was “killing too many trees.”
In law school, it is customary to spend time together outlining the material from the courses, in preparation for the final examination. Since all of my textbooks were on tape, I spent hours listening to and taking copious notes from these tapes; notes that I then attempted to weave into coherent outlines. Marveling at the conciseness and precision with which everyone else in my study group could concoct their outlines, I spent six months feeling like a sub-performer in this game of strategic one-upmanship. Why were these students all so clever and concise with their outlines? Why did their outlines seem so similar and perfect?
One day, I requested that part of a textbook chapter be scanned for me so that I could print out a case analysis in braille. I was shocked to discover that within the printed text was the form and structure for the outlines that I’d assumed were prepared from my classmates’ own creative initiative. There, within the structure of topic headings, sub-topic titles, and sub-sub-topics were the shapes and structures that had eluded me as I’d laboriously prepared homemade outlines based on voluminous pages of notes. Had it all been that simple? Why, they’d just copied their outline structures out of the book, then fleshed them out with whatever they thought essential. It hit me hard then that the unavailability of most materials in braille denied me not only information, but time, efficiency, and the ability to work on an equal and competitive level.
Statistically speaking, the braille-reading blind population is very small. Many persons prefer other forms of alternative communication. Without braille, I would never know the shapes and color scheme of a favorite poem, the sharp punctuation of thoughtful analysis within a research paper, or the magical dreamscape of a romance novel. Whether I am leisurely examining the contents or frantically cramming facts and figures for an exam, braille provides a channel for the whispering flow of ideas.
November 1999
The best moment of my braille-reading life came just two weeks ago, however. On our first anniversary, my husband placed a vase of flowers in my arms. Unthinking, I gave him the card to read. “What does it say?” “Read it yourself,” responded my sighted husband, who had talked to a blind friend of his and painstakingly copied each key combination as it was dictated to him. The simple words “I love you” seemed so beautiful, filled with his thoughtful realization that the ability to read them myself would mean so much to me and embody the essence of who I aspire to be.