What Would the “America First” Budget Mean for Me?

Posted on by Eric Harvey

Ever since the White House released the blueprint for its “America First” budget, my email inboxes have been inundated with urgent pleas from organizations who would have their funding cut or eliminated under the new plan. After a few days, it became clear that these budget priorities would affect the work that I do and the ways that I do it on a daily basis.

Many things in this budget make me deeply uneasy, but this isn’t the place for a full analysis, and I am not a policy analyst. What I am is a person who works at the corner of blindness and academia, and I recognize things in this budget blueprint that would create very real difficulties for me on both of those counts. I will focus here on two specific cuts and the harm they would cause without creating any real benefit.

Research Funding

The “America First” budget blueprint calls for elimination of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA; p. 5). These two organizations provide funding and support for projects and programs, large and small, in the arts and humanities. 

I have personally worked on research projects that were funded by grants from the NEH, and I have benefitted from many more. In a recent email to members, the president of the Society of Biblical Literature reported that SBL members have received over $7.2 million in research grants from the NEH. Further, the SBL’s Bible Odyssey website, a source for reliable, scholarly information on the Bible and Bible-adjacent topics, is made possible in part by a $300,000 NEH grant.

This is just one scholarly society. Scholars working in Egyptian, Syrian, Anatolian, and Mesopotamian studies also receive funding from the NEH. 

Their research links us to our shared cultural heritage. It connects us to the roots of Western society and the worlds from which our major religions sprang. If you cringe when ISIS bulldozes ancient gates in Palmyra, churches in Aleppo, or palaces in Nineveh, you should cringe when the humanities are dismantled at home. 

I might be more sympathetic to this budget reduction if the amount of money saved were not so extraordinarily small. The NEA and NEH each received about $148 million last year, meaning together they made up only 0.006% of the federal budget. Their elimination is an ideological and symbolic gesture that would do a great deal of harm while doing taxpayers very little good.

Educational Resources

According to the blueprint document, “[t]he 2017 Budget…continues support for the nation’s most vulnerable populations, such as students with disabilities” (p. 17). If only that were true. It seems that, in reality, these budget priorities would place a heavy burden on students with disabilities. For younger students, the emphasis on charter schools would probably end up reducing school choice and educational quality (see point 3 in this article). 

For me in particular, and other blind students, scholars, and citizens of all ages, it would mean increased difficulty in accessing books and other academic materials. The budget jeopardizes funding for the Educational Technology, Media, and Materials for Individuals with Disabilities Program, which benefits me through services like Bookshare.

Bookshare is an online library that provides accessible digital versions of print books to people who are blind, have a learning disability, or are otherwise unable to read print. Their catalog contains more than half a million books, and is growing quickly.

I use Bookshare literally every day—it is not my only source for accessible books, but it is a major one, and it has saved me dozens, if not hundreds of hours of work in the past few years.

And this is why Bookshare is so important, for me and for everyone else: because it saves so much work. Bookshare is an incredibly efficient and economical program, and defunding it would make life more burdensome for students of every age and level, and would end up increasing costs for everyone. Here’s how:

Books enter the Bookshare library in two ways: either publishers send digital files directly, or volunteers scan printed books and submit their own files. When a volunteer digitizes a book, it takes a few hours to scan the book, OCR and edit the text, and prepare the file. After that, it can be downloaded and read in large print, Braille, or audio by students nationwide using any number of disability-specific apps and devices. There is some additional labor in maintaining the database and website, but it is minuscule in comparison with what would be required if Bookshare’s federal funding were cut.

If that happened, the burden of providing accessible materials to disabled students would shift to local school districts. Not all districts would be able to advocate with publishers as effectively as Bookshare, which would increase the burden on volunteers and paid school staff. That same 4-10 hours of work digitizing books would have to be done anew in every district in every area of the country.

This could only play out in two ways: either local taxes would increase to accommodate the increased need, or educational outcomes for disabled students would suffer due to lack of resources. More likely, both of these would happen to a greater or lesser extent in every school district, depending on the resources at their disposal.

I am a firm believer that U.S. schools should provide excellent educations to students with disabilities, so that they can become self-sufficient, contributing members of society. But I also believe that accommodations for students with disabilities should be made in the most efficient and effective way.

In the digital age, centralization is the best way to provide many kinds of accessible materials in the most economical way  without compromising its quality or availability. A federal dollar simply goes much further than a state or local dollar. Cutting federal funding for accessible materials may appear to save money, but any savings will be offset by a manifold increase in costs at the state and local level. It helps no one, and hurts everyone.

Other Cuts

These are only two issues raised by the budget blueprint, but there are many other, darker parts of the White House budget priorities. The cuts to Legal Services could prevent citizens with disabilities from seeking and receiving justice from discrimination and mistreatment. Cuts to the Department of Labor, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and various programs like Meals on Wheels could remove much-needed aid from the disabled, poor, elderly, or otherwise vulnerable populations in the U.S.

In short, these specific cuts and the “America First” budget priorities as a whole are hostile to academic learning and disabled citizens. Furthermore, any savings at the federal level would increase costs locally, creating a net harm to taxpayers. Pleas contact your legislative representatives and suggest budget priorities that do more than pay lip service to education and the idea of supporting vulnerable populations.

***

If you would like to help support Bookshare, I would appreciate it! They have provided this very easy to use tool to write your representatives about it: Support Bookshare. 

My Braille Toolbox: Epilogue

Posted on by Eric Harvey

The word

Building Braille: The History of Braille, and Where Design is Taking it Next

My friend and accessibility maestro Jennifer Sutton brought this article from Print Magazine to my attention yesterday, and it seemed like a fitting epilogue to my Braille Toolbox series (which starts here). People are doing more innovative and creative things with Braille than I knew or imagined!

My Braille Toolbox Part 4: What’s Next?

Posted on by Eric Harvey

Well, we’ve reached the end of my small Braille toolbox (see Parts One, Two, and Three of this series, if you haven’t already), but the fun isn’t over! I still anticipate needing a few other Braille gadgets, and the inventions and innovations that are popping up everywhere in the Braille world make the future look very exciting.

What’s Next for Me?

 The next item down my Braille wishlist is an embosser—basically the Braille version of a regular printer.

A product photo of the Juliet 120 embosser, from the front.

This connects to a computer and embosses any text file in hard-copy Braille. It cuts down the time involved in making Braille, since you can type and edit on the computer with a QWERTY keyboard, make multiple copies, etc. Since my work involves a lot of comparing texts side-by-side, being able to print them out instead of switching back and forth on a Braille display will be a huge time-saver.

There are a couple of variables to consider when choosing a Braille embosser. Some only emboss on one side of the paper; others emboss both sides, staggering the lines of dots so they don’t interfere with one another. Some only do Braille text, while others specialize in tactile graphics, and some do both.

These machines tend to be expensive—from $2000 to about $7000 for personal embossers (industrial embossers can run $50,000 or more), so knowing what you want is critical.I’m very interested in trying to use tactile graphics to represent cuneiform texts, so that I can still read them in the original sign system, rather than relying on transliteration. I also anticipate a high volume of embossing, so double-sided would be very nice.

My current dream machine is the Juliet 120, from Humanware. It quickly embosses double-sided Braille and comes with tactile graphics software. Do you have a Braille embosser you love and think I should consider? Tell me about it in the comments!

What is the Future of Braille Tech?

A product photo of the new BLITAB Braille tablet.

Like everything in tech right now, there’s a lot of innovation happening in accessibility. For Braille displays, it looks like devices are going to get better, more diverse, and much cheaper in coming years. 

Humanware has created a Braille display/tablet hybrid, the BrailleNote Touch, which has a Braille display and traditional keyboard, as well as a touch screen interface that runs on Android.

A number of companies now produce multiline Braille displays, including Canute from Bristol Braille Technologies and the TACTIS100 from Tactisplay Corp.

These two are primarily for desktop use, but the race is on to produce the first Braille tablet/ebook—a standalone, full-page Braille display that is light and durable enough to be truly portable.

The first one to market will probably be BLITAB. This tablet is being developed by an international team in Austria, and it’s being intentionally designed for a worldwide user base, so it should handle multiple languages easily. The pins are raised and lowered by smart materials instead of mechanical actuators, which increases its durability and decreases its complexity and weight. It looks like BLITAB is now available for preorder, and will ship later this year!

Another company working on Braille tablets is Dot, which is already getting quite a bit of good press for their Braille smartwatch, the Dot Watch, which displays not only the time, but text messages and alerts from your phone. Once the Dot Watch ships (starting April 1), they will shift their R&D energy to developing two Braille tablets, the Dot Mini and the Dot Tab. 

There are rumors of other technologies in development, too, like rotary Braille displays that have the cells set on the edge of a rotating disc. This way, you could read continuously without even having to move your finger. 

I’m glad I chose to invest in a mature technology this time, because most of the next-generation Braille tech will need a few years to iron the kinks out, but I’m very excited about the amount of innovation and improvement that is happening.

My Braille Toolbox Part 3: The Refreshable Braille Display

Posted on by Eric Harvey

(This is Part Three of a Series. Here’s Part One and Part Two)

Ok, we’re skipping a few historical developments here, but this is my beautiful new Braille display, the VarioUltra 20, by BAUM.

A photo showing the entirety of my new VarioUltra, out of its leather case and at a slanty angle. 

The current generation of Braille displays like the VarioUltra combine the functionality of two earlier pieces of technology, the Braille notetaker and the refreshable braille display. They can function as either independent PDAs or as displays for a phone or computer.

The Hardware

The display portion is a single line containing, in this case, 20 Braille cells. There is also a VarioUltra 40, with 40 cells, and other displays range from 14 to 80 cells in length.

These things are truly mechanical marvels. The tiny nylon pins that make the Braille dots are only spaced 2.2 mm apart, and they must all be able to raise and lower independently. Each of the 160 dots on this display is connected to its own lever, which is raised up and down by a crystal that expands under electrical current and contracts when it is removed. They refresh in a fraction of a second—much less than the time that it takes to move your finger from the end of the line back to the beginning. And though they be small, they must be reliable and durable enough to be read hundreds of thousands of times.

The interface is entirely tactile, and the device is simply rife with buttons to navigate menus and files, enter and edit text, and manage physical and wireless connections.

At the top of the unit, there is an eight-key keyboard that is analogous to the six-key keyboard on the Perkins Brailler. Each key corresponds to one dot. Below that is the row of  Braille cells, each of which has a small button above it which are used for cursor routing and text manipulations. On either side of the braille display are three buttons used to navigate whatever text, file, or website you are reading. The bottommost row contains a little joystick they call a NaviStick, used to navigate the operating system, four system keys, and two space bars.

Functionality

In independent notetaker mode, the VarioUltra has its own OS with a suite of productivity apps: a text reader and word processor, PDF viewer, spreadsheet viewer, calculator, etc.  

I can store files on there, from notes and handouts to whole books. It’s finally going to make Braille portable for me in a real and useful way. I mean, if you wanted to take a book to the park or coffeeshop to read, what would you rather carry?

Photo of a stack of large Braille volumes, my library loan of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, next to my sleek little VarioUltra.

When it’s hooked up to an iPhone, I can use it to read my email, articles, websites, facebook, twitter, and any other accessible material that’s available. 

Since this is my first Braille display, I anticipate a steep learning curve. To be honest, i haven’t even turned it on yet. This isn’t the intuitive, easy to pick up and start using technology we’ve gotten so used to. It’s the kind of technology where you read all the documentation before you even get started, and it still takes a while to get up to speed. With the crazy week i had, I just haven’t had that kind of time. That’s what the next few days are for.

I’m excited to get to know this device. I’m excited to carry Braille with me, to be able to read and work quietly again, and to get better and faster at reading Braille because I’m using it more and using it more seriously. I’ll keep you posted on how it goes!

My Braille Toolbox Part 2: The Perkins Brailler

Posted on by Eric Harvey

(This post is part 2 in a series. See Part One here.) 

The second Braille gadget I acquired was the legendary Perkins Brailler. My case worker at the Department of Rehabilitation had an extra one lying around the warehouse, so he told me to take it home and see if I liked it. I wasn’t interested at first, thinking I would be getting some higher tech gizmos soon, and this one would just end up on a shelf. I’m glad I gave it a try, because it is a cool little machine and it has been a lot of fun to play around with.

So what exactly is a Brailler? Essentially, it is a manual Braille typewriter.

A photo of my Perkins Brailler from the front side.

Mechanical Braillewriters first appeared in 1892, but before the invention of the Perkins Brailler, they had all been expensive, fragile, and unreliable. When Dr. Gabriel Farrell took over as head of the Perkins School for the Blind in 1931, he determined to create a portable, durable, and inexpensive Brailler. He commissioned David Abraham, a woodworker who taught manual trades at the school, to design and engineer the project. The venture was funded by the Perkins School’s subsidiary, Howe Press, at a substantial financial risk. By the time the first run of units was produced, Howe Press had expended more than half of its capital on the project. 

Mr. Abraham spent around 15 years engineering the Perkins Brailler, and his skill and perfectionism showed. After its release in 1951, the company could barely keep up with demand. It was quite simply the best and most reliable Brailler on the market, and set the standard for other Braillers to meet for fifty years. Now there is a new and improved model, but I have one of the trusty originals.

Note that the keyboard only has nine keys. The six main keys, three per side, each emboss one of the six dots in a Braille cell. The inner two correspond to the top row, the next ones out to the middle row, and the furthest out to the bottom row. The raised button on the left is a line break, the one on the right is a backspace, and the middle button is space. The carriage must be returned manually to the beginning after every line break, using that swoopy piece of plastic just above the keyboard.

 Since each main key controls only one dot, every character must be typed by pressing the correct combination of keys simultaneously. If you miss a dot, you can use the backspace key to set the carriage over the previous cell and easily add it in. It’s not nearly as fast as typing on a QWERTY keyboard, but it is much, much faster than the slate and stylus. That page of notes that took me two hours before? Now I could type it in five or ten minutes.  

On top of that, it’s just plain fun to use. You can feed most kinds of paper into it, which means you can emboss on blank paper or add Braille to just about any printed page, card, gift tag, etc. Since I got my hands on it, I’ve been Brailling everything in sight. 

A photo of some gift tags i Brailled for Christmas presents.

The Upshot: This is still not the apotheosis of Braille technology, but its simplicity and versatility mean that I will probably always find uses for it.

 

Reference:

Jan Seymour-Ford. “History of the Perkins Brailler.” Outlook for the Blind (Nov. 2009).

My Braille Toolbox: A Guided Trip through Braille-Writing History

Posted on by Eric Harvey

A close up image of the VarioUltra 20 from the front.

My new Bluetooth Braille display finally arrived in the mail!

It has been on back order since December, and I’ve had these long weeks of waiting to think about Braille writing and how the technology has evolved over time. I have a few other Braille gadgets, and I realized my acquisitions had unintentionally imitated the course of Braille-writing technology.

So this week I am going to share a bit about the tools I have and how useful they are. I don’t have something from every stage in the development of Braille tech, but it will be enough to give you a general idea.

Let’s start at the very beginning.

The Slate and Stylus

Welcome to the nineteenth century! This simple tool was invented even before Braille. Napoleon wanted a way for his armies to communicate at night, without light or sound, so he commissioned a guy named Charles Barbier to create a writing system that could be read without any light. Barbier had the idea of using fingers to read raised dots and lines. He invented a system and the slate and stylus to write it. His system was too complicated and never caught on, but Louis Braille learned about it a few decades later, and simplified it to create the six-dot Braille system we use today.

I got my slate and stylus last August from the Lighthouse for the Blind in San Francisco. I picked it up on a whim, because I wanted practice using my newly acquired Braille and this was the cheapest and simplest way to get started.

An image of my hand holding a Braille stylus and pressing it into the back of a slate with a piece of paper inside.

It works kind of like a stencil. The slate is a hinged piece of metal that clamps onto a sheet of paper. It provides a template that ensures the exact spacing necessary to create readable Braille. To write, you have to press the stylus, a blunt awl, into the appropriate guide holes.

One dot at a time.

Backwards.

That’s right, backwards. Because you’re poking the dots in from the back to raise them on the front side, you have to write every line and every cell in the wrong direction, like writing in a mirror.

It takes forever.

And then you flip it over to see how many mistakes you made.

An image of my hand lifting up the front of the slate to reveal the sentence

The problem is, since Braille cells have two columns of dots, almost every character is the mirror image of another one. If you aren’t paying attention and forget to flip them, you end up with ‘i’ instead of ‘e’ or ‘z’ instead of ‘and.’ One time I was making a sheet of notes. It took me more than two hours. and when I was done it was filled with typos (Braille-os? stylos? I don’t know).

You can get a better sense of the process by using this neat Slate and Stylus Simulator I found.

The Upshot: it’s better than nothing, but barely.

Braille and Cognition

Posted on by Eric Harvey

A couple of weeks ago, I went into the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute in San Francisco to hear a presentation by my friend Robert Englebretson. Robert is a professor of linguistics at Rice University. He is blind, and I met him through an email group of blind academics. In addition to his primary linguistic research on Indonesian languages, Robert has begun to research Braille reading using the tools of cognitive linguistics. It’s exciting research that points the way toward better Braille for everyone.

This particular presentation was about a study he had done on Braille contractions with his Rice colleague Simon Fischer-Baum. I haven’t said much about contracted Braille since my very first post, so I’ll recap: in order to save space and increase reading speed, there are a bunch of contractions that reduce the length of common letter combinations and words. Some of these contractions have to appear by themselves, but others can be used as parts of larger words. These include small groups of letters like [er], [ch], [ing], and [the], as well as words like [time], [ever}, and [less]. 

In English Braille, these contractions were determined largely by statistical frequency. The most common letter combinations and words got contracted, meaning the most possible space got saved on the page. In the days when huge tomes had to be hand-Brailled, this made a lot of sense, but it’s a practice that benefits the producers of Braille, and its effect on readers had never been studied. 

For decades, the prevailing assumption in Braille education has held that blind Braille readers expand all of the contracted words into their full print form before interpreting them. If this is true, then all contractions should be equally readable. But are they?

Granted, there are some contracted spellings that everybody agrees are a bad idea. My favorite is this gem:

⠡⠑⠐⠍⠁⠏⠽

In English characters, that’s 

[ch] [e] [mother] [a] [p] [y]

Chemotherapy. Sure, it’s space-efficient—it shortens a twelve-letter word to seven cells. But the two-cell (dot 5, m) contraction for [mother] is so ingrained to mean “mother” that everyone inevitably reads it something like “Key-mother-a-pee.” Is saving the space of five cells on the page worth losing a few seconds every time you have to make sense of this word? Not to me.

Robert set out to show that the same process happens in less egregious situations as well. You don’t often run into contractions as bad as “chemotherapy,” but there are many, many examples of contractions that cause momentary confusion and delays in comprehension. Take ”redo” for example, which can be written in Braille as [r] [ed] [o]. Most people can’t help but read it as “red-o.”

Basically, Robert theorized that reading problems occur when contractions conflict with our understanding of a word’s sublexical structure. We all intuitively understand that some words are made up of smaller units that have been smooshed together. “Redo” is the verb “do,” plus the prefix “re-.” We understand it as a two-part word, and when the [ed] contraction effectively erases the boundary between the two parts, we stumble over the reading.

And this is exactly what he found in a large number of similar cases. I won’t go into the methodology or technical details here, but Robert was able to show that fluent Braille readers took longer to comprehend words when contractions crossed sublexical boundaries than they did when the contractions did not cross boundaries. This implies that Braille readers are reading those contractions as single units, covering up any dividing lines that may exist within them. In other words, the theory that Braille readers uncontract words before they process them does not hold up.

To me, sitting in the audience, Robert’s results seemed right on. To be fair, I remember a time when I did have to uncontract every word I read. When I was first learning contracted Braille, I had to picture every word in my head, building each one letter by letter as I read each cell. But this was just a symptom of my inexperience, and I moved past it quickly. After a month or so, I no longer had to picture the words I was reading. Instead, the cells brought sounds into my mind—whether letters, syllables, or entire words. 

Then, maybe a month ago, something different happened. I brushed my finger over some Braille text and all of a sudden the meaning of the words came into my head. Not the sounds, the meanings. It felt surreal, how automatic it was. I took that for granted with print reading—for most print readers it becomes so automatic that it isn’t even a choice. Text is read as soon as it is seen, whether you like it or not. It was very strange to have that sensation in Braille. 

Right now that only happens with very simple language. Less common words take a little longer, and rare words or weird contracted spellings can trip me up pretty bad. As I gain experience, more will become automatic and everything will come faster, but Robert’s research suggests that some contracted spellings will never stop slowing me down.

The study shows that cognitive linguistics can provide valuable insights into Braille reading, and points the way toward further research. In time, we may be able to more precisely distinguish between contractions that help and contractions that hinder, We may also come to see which other features of the current Braille system improve speed and comprehension, and which do not. Eventually, research like this could influence best practices that optimize Braille for the human beings who read it rather than pages it is embossed on.

SBL!

Posted on by Eric Harvey

A photograph of the San Antonio Riverwalk. Just like me, the people in this photo have not fallen in the river.

I just got home from San Antonio, where I attended the Annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature. SBL, as we call it, is the largest conference of biblical scholars in the world, and it’s held in conjunction with the American Academy of Religion. This means that for one weekend a year, thousands upon thousands of scholars in biblical and religious studies descend upon one unsuspecting American city.

The scope of the thing is truly mind-boggling. There are hundreds of papers and presentations each day, covering every conceivable topic within and around biblical studies and religion. It’s a great place for scholars to hear about new discoveries, new ideas, and new approaches, and to share their own ideas and get feedback before committing them to print. But the best part is reconnecting with friends and colleagues and meeting new ones. The conversations over dinners and drinks are consistently stimulating and gloriously nerdy.

For me, SBL also offers a chance to reflect on how I am changing and still need to change as my sight wanes. It’s a different experience every year.

The most noticeable change this year: I used my white cane. Last year I brought it with me, and I carried it in my bag throughout the weekend, but I never actually took it out to use it. This time I had it out almost the entire time. Inside and in daylight I don’t really need it for the large-scale tasks of orientation and navigation, but it warns me of curbs, planters, and benches, and warns people around me that I will definitely run into them if they don’t move. At night on the narrow and winding Riverwalk, on the other hand, I needed the cane (and a few timely nudges from my friends) to keep from taking a swim.

The social and networking aspect of the conference keeps changing, too. I’ve never been great at picking faces out of a crowd, but now it’s near impossible. I’m sure I walked right by dozens of people I should have said hello to, and failed to notice friends and colleagues attending sessions with me. Name tags are useless, so I’m sure I also miss out on meeting scholars whose work I know but have never met in person.

Even meeting close friends can be disorienting. Suddenly someone appears right in front of me, or beside me walking in lockstep, and it takes a few seconds to piece together who they are from their voice and whatever visual clues I can get. Sometimes I start a hug or a handshake without knowing who’s on the other side, and recognize them halfway through. Luckily, my assumption that people who want to hug me or shake my hand generally have a good reason to do so hasn’t backfired yet! 

I am curious to see how my experience of the conference changes over time. It will continue to provide a benchmark for my vision and adaptation, as well as for my scholarly career. Next year I plan to present a paper—a dual novelty since it will be my first paper at an academic conference and my first presentation from Braille notes!

Last Month and Last Year

Posted on by Eric Harvey

A series of butterfly cocoons. Some are still closed, a few are open. A butterfly has just emerged from one of them.

It’s been a quiet month here on the blog, because life outside the blog has been a whirlwind. My parents came into town for two weeks to help me clear some of the last medical and bureaucratic hurdles involved in relocating and getting social services. There’s a lot of bureaucracy involved in going blind—a lot of paperwork and visits to doctors and government buildings, then a lot of waiting, then more visits to doctors and government buildings. My parents graciously ferried me all over the Bay, condensing errands that would have taken me weeks into a few days.

It was the big push at the end of a long year of change. About this time last year my dissertation proposal was accepted by the faculty in my department and I became officially A.B.D. I had already been legally blind for a year before that, but the proposal marked a turning point. It was the last piece of work I was able to complete without radically changing my process to accommodate reduced vision.

And since then? Well, I haven’t made substantial progress on the actual dissertation in almost a year.

It’s not like I’ve been idle. Our family moved across the country and settled in a new town. Kristin started a new job in a new career. Jane turned from a baby into a toddler. I learned Braille and mobility skills, dove deep into accessibility, and developed new workflows for research and writing.

Looking back, it feels like I spent the year in some kind of professional chrysalis, a space that allowed me to process, change, and transform. Now I feel like I can finally return to the work I set out to do in the first place.  It won’t be smooth and easy sailing as a beautiful blind butterfly, but at least I’m ready to start moving forward.