“Congratulations, you have completed the study of contracted Braille!” said the dots to my fingers earlier this week. Or rather, “C[ong]ratul[ation]s, [you] [have] [com]plet[ed] [the] [st]udy [of] [con]tract[ed] brl!”

I’ve been studying Braille for a year. I learned Grade One quickly and easily enough — it’s what most people think of when they think of Braille, where each cell represents one letter or one punctuation mark. Grade Two, or contracted Braille, is another story. Various contractions are used to shorten common words or series of letters, so one or two cells can represent two, three, four or more letters. In the quote above, everything within brackets is contracted. There are dozens of these contractions, and many of the signs play multiple roles, depending on context. So Grade Two Braille took a little longer, due to its complexity and, well, life getting in the way.

I feel proud of this little milestone (and relieved that there are no more lists of brain-breaking contractions left to learn), but I also know I’ve got a lot of milestones left ahead of me.

I am slowly going blind, and slowly learning to be blind and work as a blind scholar. I am not at the very beginning, but neither am I anywhere near the end. I have a long path ahead of me as I gain the skills I need to conduct my research, finish my dissertation, and teach what I have learned.

I know all the contractions now, but I also know I need to speed up. I timed myself to see my current pace: sixteen minutes and twenty-five seconds for one page—just shy of fourteen words per minute. It’s not bad for a beginner, but I feel like a six-year-old. I want to fly through academic prose; instead, I’m struggling through the simple stories in my Braille primer.

So now I am shifting to work on speed and technique. “Elite” Braille readers usually read around 130–150 words per minute, and I’ve heard rumors that some have reached 400 words per minute. They use three fingers on each hand, reading with both hands. I have a lot of work ahead to master Braille, and that is just English Braille. I will probably end up using it for German, French, and Hebrew as well.

The state of my Braille is much like the state of my journey into blindness as a whole. I’ve made progress, but there is still a lot of work and learning to do. I’m starting this blog in the middle, not the beginning. I hope to make it a space to share the process— not only with Braille but with all the other strange adventures of blind scholarship: exploration, experimentation, collaboration, frustration, and hopefully a few moments of exhilaration. I’ll get into the nitty gritty of multi-lingual Braille reading, my quest for the perfect word processor, adventures with assistive technologies, and much, much more. I’ll also use the space to share more general thoughts on life, blindness, my research, and everything else besides.

Please read along and tell me what you think. Whether a lifelong friend, another blind person on a similar path, or just a curious stranger, I look forward to hearing from you!

(Addendum: As of January 1, 2016, Level One and Level Two Braille are outdated terms. The new Unified English Braille standard is now the most prevalent form of Braille, as it combines and streamlines literary and computer Braille codes. The primer I used to learn Braille used the old system. Those in the know may have noticed the [ation] abbreviation, which no longer exists in UEB.)