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Pairing the iPhone 4 with the Freedom Pro Bluetooth Keyboard

June 28, 2010 • Darrell Shandrow Hilliker

The Freedom Pro Bluetooth keyboard from Freedom Input may be used as an alternative to the touch screen for typing text. This can be particularly helpful for performing text entry tasks such as taking notes and writing e-mail.

As of June 28, Freedom Input has not provided instructions for connecting the keyboard to the iPhone in its knowledge base or manuals. This document provides those instructions in a format that is especially useful for blind people.

The gestures and instructions in this document assume VoiceOver is enabled.

Preparing the Keyboard

Follow these steps to prepare the keyboard for use:

  1. Place the keyboard on a desk or other hard surface and orient it so that the rough plastic end is to the left and the rectangular raised button is to the right.
  2. Press in on the button to release the keyboard and open it to its full size.
  3. Locate the hinge on the top of the keyboard near its middle.
  4. Locate the indented lever to the left of the hinge and pull it to the right using a fingernail. This keeps the keyboard open during use. Move the lever back to the left before folding the keyboard.
  5. Locate the raised, round, vertical battery cover at the far left end of the keyboard.
  6. Pull the top half of the battery cover forward and up until it has been removed.
  7. Insert two AAA batteries flat-end-first.
  8. Replace the battery cover.

Pairing the Keyboard with the iPhone

Follow these steps to pair your keyboard with the iPod Touch or iPhone:

  1. Disconnect the iPhone from the data cable so it is not docked or plugged into the battery charger or computer.
  2. Turn on your iPhone.
  3. Tap the Home button.
  4. Double tap Settings.
  5. Double tap General.
  6. Double tap Bluetooth.
  7. Move to the Bluetooth button and make sure it says “on.” If not, double tap the button to change its status. The iPhone will start searching for available Bluetooth devices.
  8. On the keyboard, locate the two slide switches near the lower left-hand corner.
  9. Move the top switch to the right to select HID (Human Interface Device) mode.
  10. Move the bottom switch to the left to turn on the keyboard. Move it back to the right anytime you won’t be needing to use the keyboard.
  11. Locate a small hole immediately above the two slide switches.
  12. Using a pen or stylus, press and hold the button in the reset hole for four to five seconds. This makes the keyboard discoverable so it can be paired with the phone.
  13. Flick left or right around the Bluetooth screen on the iPhone until you find the Freedom Pro Keyboard button.
  14. Double tap the button to start the pairing process.
  15. Listen carefully to VoiceOver until you hear four numbers. Remember these numbers.
  16. Enter the numbers you heard on the keyboard and press the enter key.
  17. VoiceOver should say the keyboard has been paired. Double tap the OK button.

Now that the keyboard has been paired successfully, you can use it to type in apps such as Mail and Notes. Simply locate Mail or Notes on the Home screen, double tap and start using the Freedom Pro keyboard anywhere you would normally have to use the on-screen keyboard.

Major thanks go to Jon, a technical support representative with Freedom Input, for his patience and thorough assistance with the Bluetooth pairing process on the keyboard.

Please feel free to add a comment to this post if you encounter any problems following these instructions or I can help in any other way.

Arcadia Real Estate Professional Gives His Life Blood to Help Others

May 31, 2010 • Darrell Shandrow Hilliker

Arcadia commercial real estate professional Lawrence A. Lippincott saves lives through his frequent donation of blood platelets.

The platelets, which are a part of the blood that enables clotting after a cut, scrape or other injury, are most often needed by cancer patients.

“There’s definitely a shortage of platelets because it takes about two to two and a half hours to donate them each week,” Lippincott said. “I think most people who do this donate whole blood, which only takes about 15 minutes.”

Lippincott donates platelets about once per week at United Blood Services’ Commerce Center location at 1405 N. Hayden in Scottsdale.

He said donating blood is a comfortable and easy way to give back to the community.

“They make you as comfortable as possible. You get a snack and beverages afterwards. You can read, listen to music or watch TV,” Lippincott said. “The room has to be kept cool because of the blood products, so they put heating pads on your back and a blanket over you.”

He said blood donation is even more convenient for him because of the slow commercial real estate industry in the valley.

“You’re giving blood so it’s not a form of economic hardship on a family or a person,” Lippincott said. “It’s not like giving aid to Afghanistan where sometimes it ends up stuck on the dock, they’ve bought the wrong products and it goes to waste because there’s a lot of bureaucracy. But you know this blood goes to a good cause. We’re saving lives.”

Lippincott said he has been donating blood on a volunteer basis for over 20 years.

“I had just moved to California and gotten a job as a shopping center manager,” he said. “I just saw one of those blood mobiles and decided to donate. I’ve been doing it ever since.”

Scottsdale real estate professional Branden Lombardi said he relied on donated blood during his three-year battle against bone cancer, which was diagnosed at age 17.

“You have to be very conscious of your blood counts while going through treatments because the idea behind chemotherapy is to target all rapidly dividing cells in order to kill the cancer,” Lombardi said. “It also kills the white blood cells that help you fight infection, the red blood cells that deliver oxygen throughout your body and the platelets which help prevent blood from flowing when you cut or scrape yourself or brush your teeth too hard.”

He said he received frequent transfusions of red blood cells and platelets after each of his chemotherapy treatments.

Lombardi said a stem cell transplant put his cancer into remission.

“They gave me ultra-high doses of chemotherapy to wipe out all the cancer,” Lombardi said. “When I was done with the chemotherapy, they introduced the stem cells into my body with the idea of building me back up.”

“After the transplant, I received daily transfusions of red blood cells and platelets to help me recover faster,” he said.

At age 29, Lombardi said he appreciates the generosity of blood donors like Lippincott.

“I’m not speaking hypothetically when I say blood donors helped save my life,” he said. “In October I will have been nine years post-transplant, there have been no reoccurrences of cancer, and I am as happy and healthy as anyone can be.”

Sue Thew, media and public relations specialist with United Blood Services, said the demand for blood in the valley always outstrips supply, especially for platelets.

“We fill the needs of 54 hospitals in this state and it takes about 700 blood donors each day to do that,” she said.

Thew said United Blood Services always finds a way to meet the needs of the community.

“Arizona is quickly becoming the epicenter for cancer research and modern medical treatments,” Thew said. “The increased demand in platelet transfusions for those patients is currently being met with the assistance of out-of-state resources. To accommodate this surge, we are expanding facilities for platelet donations and are actively looking for more platelet donors.”

She said it’s a race against time.

“Platelets have a shelf life of five days,” Thew said. “The first 24 to 36 hours are spent testing and preparing the platelets, so we don’t have much time to get those donations to the people who need them most.”

Thew said platelets are just one of several possible ways to donate blood.

“You can also give red blood cells, plasma or whole blood, with whole blood taking as few as 15 minutes to donate,” said Thew. “The component of your blood you would be donating depends on your blood type and our most pressing needs.”

Thew said she recommends anyone interested in donating blood to call United Blood Services at 877-448-4483 or visit the organization’s website at unitedbloodservices.org.

“I’m happy to be giving something that I know is going 100 percent to the end user,” Lippincott said. “I think the important thing is that it’s not about me. It’s about getting the word out that there is a shortage in the community and there’s always a need. This is something people can do to give when money is tight.”

Categories: Uncategorized

New Downtown Court Tower Design Aims to Protect Crime Victims

May 1, 2010 • Darrell Shandrow Hilliker

This story, which I originally wrote for my news writing class, was just published on a local news website.

The new Maricopa County Court Tower will be designed to safeguard the rights of crime victims.

The 16-story tower located at the corner of First Avenue and Madison Street in downtown Phoenix is slated for a Feb. 2012 opening.

Criminal court administrator Bob James said separation of defendants and victims is a key design feature of the new building.

“We have provided spaces that are private for the use of victims,” James said. “If a person is uncomfortable with being in the courtroom, they can be in
an adjacent victims’ room where they can watch all the proceedings.”

He said this separation is important in areas people might not think about.

“Victims told us that sometimes they feel apprehensive when they have to use the bathroom,” James said. “The nearest restroom may be where the defendant
or his or her family goes.”

He said the victims’ rooms address this concern by providing separate restroom facilities.

James said every effort has been taken to maintain separation when victims must appear in open court.

“If the prosecutors decide the victim needs to testify, they would actually need to come into the courtroom,” James said. “But, even then, we’ve created
an entrance separate from the gallery or the one used by defendants.”

James said security is critical in a courthouse that will also hold defendants whose cases are coming up for trial.

“One of the lower levels will be a holding facility for the Sharif’s department,” James said. “They will have the holding capacity for up to 1,400 defendants.
so the only time the traffic flow of the in-custody defendants meets with the judges, staff and the public is in the courtroom itself.”

Special Court Counsel Jessica Funkhouser said the need for separation of defendants from victims goes beyond comfort and safety.

“Victims are regularly cautioned by judges and prosecutors to avoid showing their emotions in the courtroom so as not to cause a mistrial,” Funkhouser said.
“They can retreat to the victims’ room and watch the trial on a video monitor without having to worry about the jury or anyone else in the courtroom seeing
them.”

Criminal defense attorney Michael V. Black said he has reservations about the preferential treatment of crime victims in the courthouse.

“There’s a whole lot of types of victims and they’re just another witness,” Black said. “I don’t see why they should be given any more consideration than
an ordinary witness in a particular case. If they treated everyone the same, that would be fine with me.”

He said he would be concerned if it turns out a courthouse designed to protect victims interfered with a defendant’s constitutional right to face their
accuser.

“The Supreme Court said the victim has to be there (in court) and they have to testify in front of the defendant and have to be cross-examined in front
of them, so they can’t do anything to interfere with that,” Black said. “If the courtroom impedes on that, it will not pass constitutional muster.”

Funkhouser said separating defendants and their families from victims and their families benefits everyone.

“You’ve seen videos where fights break out in courtrooms where the families of defendants and victims jump over the rails and attack each other,” she said.
“The whole idea is that a courthouse that’s safe for victims is going to be safer for everybody.”

Funkhouser said the design of the new court tower has been carried out in direct compliance with Arizona’s constitution and legislation addressing the need
to minimize contact between defendants and victims.

“I don’t know of any other court buildings in the United States that have gone to this extent,” Funkhouser said. “Arizona is the first state to have a victims’
bill of rights amendment. So I think this courthouse is the most innovative in terms of addressing victims’ needs and their rights.”

Guest article contributed by Darrell Shandrow and Jordan Moon, Students
Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication

Categories: Uncategorized

Tempe Invites Public Comment on Proposed Bus, Light Rail Service Cuts

March 1, 2010 • Darrell Shandrow Hilliker

Tempe officials explained options for cost-cutting reductions in bus and light rail service and heard concerns in a Tuesday evening public comment meeting.

The proposed cuts include increased wait times on buses and light rail and the complete elimination of Sunday service.

Around 40 Tempe residents and those who pass through the city’s transit system told officials how the service reductions would impact their lives.

Tempe resident Jeff Sargent relies on the blue neighborhood buses to get around the city.

“I always use the Orbit to get downtown because parking and traffic is a zoo,” Sargent said prior to the meeting. “I rode down here on Orbit Earth.”

Sargent said his biggest concern is keeping the Orbit buses running every day on a reasonably frequent schedule. He said he does not like the idea of eliminating Sunday service.

Sargent said Tempe might lose him as a transit customer if cuts run too deep.

“In that case, I’ll have to use my car, and that’s sad,” he said.

Greg Jordan, transit administrator for the city of Tempe, said the goal is to cut costs in ways that cause as little impact on customers as possible.

“Ridership is a key factor in determining which routes we change or eliminate,” Jordan said in the meeting. “It’s about efficiency and productivity.”

Jordan said there has been an average nationwide 12 percent dip in transit budgets while Tempe is coping with a 29 percent drop in funding.

Tempe funds transit service through a half-cent sales tax enacted in 1996.

“There is a firewall between the funds for transit service and those for the city’s general fund,” Jordan said. “The city can’t draw from transit, and the reverse is also the case.”

Tempe resident Rachel Phillips said prior to the meeting that she doesn’t like the cuts, but is grateful for the service.

She expressed concerns about her continued ability to get to work and take her children to the Boys and Girls Club.

“I would not be able to get to work and my kids wouldn’t be able to utilize an after-school program,” she said.

She said she was surprised with the meeting’s low turnout.

“The customers who complain, but aren’t here, I tell them I don’t want to hear anything about it because you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem,” Phillips said.

Jordan said the public comment meetings are held in two rounds.

Round one involves the presentation of 18 options for reducing transit service.

The feedback from the first round will be used to aid in refinement of the options into proposals for consideration in the second round of meetings to be held in late March.

The next first-round public comment meeting will be held on March 1 at 6 p.m. in the Pyle Adult Recreation Center at 655 E. Southern Ave.

Information about the proposed July 2010 service changes, the dates, locations and times of public comment meetings and an online survey are available on the city of Tempe’s tempe.gov Web site.

Categories: transportation

Art Takes Off Down the Recycle Runway in New Airport Exhibition

February 19, 2010 • Darrell Shandrow Hilliker

A new art exhibition at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport features clothing made from recycled materials.

The artist, Nancy Judd, an environmental educator with over 20 years of experience in the recycling industry, began her career in art school.

“I watched the garbage can next to the pop machine fill up with cans and that felt wrong to me,” Judd said. “With the blessing of the art school’s administration, I put a recycling bin next to the machine and was wondering what happened to the material and what it got made into.”

Commissioned by companies such as Target, Toyota and the Glass Packaging Institute, Judd spends hundreds of hours making each couture garment from materials including aluminum cans, canvas, crushed glass, paper and reclaimed thread.

She said the airport exhibition includes 14 pieces from her collection representing over ten years of work.

“There’s a dress here which is made from 12,000 pieces of crushed glass that are individually glued to a floor-length evening gown made out of upholstery remnants,” Judd said.

She said the goal of her business, Recycle Runway, is to make garments that attract attention in public venues to the issues of environmental stewardship.

“It’s our everyday, moment-to-moment decisions we make, that have caused the environmental crisis we’re in now and it’s those same moment-to-moment decisions that can help us hopefully move out of this little pickle we’ve gotten ourselves in,” Judd said.

She explained the environmental impact of a simple decision to eat an orange.

“Did you buy it from a big-box store where it was shipped in from Florida or Mexico, or from a local farmer who is keeping the money in your community,” Judd asked. “After you eat it, what do you do with the skin? Do you throw it in the landfill where it sits for as long as 20 years or do you compost it and make it into a valuable nutrient that adds back to the land?”

Judd said she goes into schools to talk with children about environmental awareness.

“I bring dresses made out of aluminum, plastic and paper and I use each garment to talk about recycling”, she said. “I have them write down a pledge on a strip of recycled white office paper stating their name and something they’re going to do, which they haven’t been doing before, to help care for the planet. Those strips of paper are being made into paper link chains that will be sewn to this huge Scarlett O’Hara-style dress. It will be exhibited in the Atlanta airport next year for 12 months.”

Judd isn’t alone in her reliance on recycled materials.

Professional artist Sherrie Zeitlin of Phoenix said money for materials was tight when she started working with K-12 children in schools around Maricopa County 15 years ago.

“What I found was the schools had no money,” Zeitlin said. “I would empower the schools, before I came in, to collect the ribbons and wrapping paper left over from the December holidays, or to collect newspaper, plastic, zippers and even old socks for use in art projects. These materials would be cut up and woven into wall pieces.”

She said this early history was the basis for her 2004 founding of the Art Resource Center.

“I put together a center where I could collect the detritus from industry, corporations and individuals to offer back to any nonprofit organization to be able to make art projects,” Zeitlin said. “It’s all offered free of charge.”

She said she has used recycled materials in her own weaving business making large-scale constructions for architects and interior designers.

“I would go to salvage yards and buy metal and plastic for use in weaving,” she said. “I remember I did a huge weaving for a Dillard’s department store all out of plastic. It looked like a big bride and it went into the lingerie department.”

Zeitlin said the use of recycled materials is a huge trend in the art world.

“It’s a necessity,” she said. “In Feb. 2010, where nobody has any money anymore, it’s a financial issue. ”

“With all the detritus in this world, it’s necessary to just use it up in a different way,” Zeitlin said. “One of the mantras for the Art Resource Center is ‘recycling art worthy materials for creative minds’.”

Lennée Eller, program manager with the Phoenix Airport Museum, said her organization hosts exhibitions by studio artists like Judd and Zeitlin in 25 spaces around the airport system including locations in Terminal 4, Terminal 3, Terminal 2, the rental car facility and even the Deer Valley and Good year airports.

“We showcase the artist’s work through the changing exhibition program for 6 months, then we bring in a new group of work,” Eller said. “The idea is that every artist, gallery and museum has an opportunity to have their work displayed. Over the years it’s been wonderful, because I’ve shown a multitude of diversity.”

Eller said most of the museum’s displays are located outside the security areas for easy access by the airport’s nearly 20,000 employees and 40 million passengers who pass through annually.

“What you see are people who have come early and are getting ready to go down the concourse,” Eller said. “Here’s an interesting secret. If there are a lot of people in line (at the security checkpoint) people will panick and go stand in line. If there are not a lot of people in line, they will stay and go shopping or stop to look at the art.”

Eller said the art draws local residents who are looking for something free to do.

“I have people come and just do the airport tour,” she said. “They come to have coffee and do a walk about just looking at all the shows.”

“We’re the gateway to the state,” said Eller. “It’s really about putting our best foot forward when you’re welcoming people and you want to show them what you’re about.”

Nancy Judd’s Recycle Runway exhibition is on display through Aug. 8 in Terminal 3, Level 2 of the airport next to Starbucks.

Eller said the Phoenix Airport Museum strives to reasonably accommodate people with disabilities who need special assistance accessing exhibitions. They are invited to call 602-273-2105 to set up an appointment.

Categories: journalism

Advocates Urge Passage of Legislation to Increase Safety, improve Accessibility and Foster Work Incentives for the Blind

February 4, 2010 • Darrell Shandrow Hilliker

WASHINGTON – Hundreds of advocates met Monday evening near Capitol Hill to urge the passage of legislation designed to ensure the safety of pedestrians around quiet cars, increase the accessibility of technology for blind people and put blind Social Security recipients back to work.

The Pedestrian Safety Enhancement Act would begin a two-year study to determine the most effective way to ensure the safety of blind and other pedestrians around electric and hybrid vehicles. The results of the study would be used to mandate a minimum level of sound quiet cars would be required to make along with any other necessary vehicle safety standards.

Advocates with the National Federation of the Blind contend the need for this law goes far beyond the blind population to include all pedestrians.

“The general public doesn’t realize that even when they’re not actively doing it, they use the sound of traffic all the time like the blind,” said Chris Danielsen, director of public relations for the National Federation of the Blind. “People are told they shouldn’t jog or walk with their headphones turned up loud because they can’t hear sounds in the environment that may be a danger.”

The federation’s leaders said they’re already making headway on this legislation. The House bill, H.R. 734, has 174 co-sponsors while the Senate bill, S. 841, has 19. Blind people will be spending the next three days working to persuade their representatives and senators to sign on and vote for a bill they say will ensure their continued freedom of safe travel.

The federation’s advocates and other interested members of the blind community are also pressing for enactment of a Technology Bill of Rights for the Blind. The proposed legislation would require that appliances, consumer electronics, kiosks and office technology be made accessible to everyone regardless of eye sight.

“Joe Shaw owns a company. He goes over to his own FAX machine, but he can’t operate it. It’s not accessible. When I go to the gymn, I can run but I can’t turn on the machines,” said John Paré, director of governmental affairs for the National Federation of the Blind. “This is wrong. This needs to be against the law and we can make it against the law this week.”

In a manner similar to the pedestrian safety legislation, a study would be conducted to determine the minimum accessibility standards companies would be required to meet. At the conclusion of the study, regulations would be enacted to enforce the new standards.

The proposed legislation, H.R. 4533, has 44 co-sponsors and advocates said they are working over the next three days to significantly increase that number.

Finally, the federation is asking Congress to pass the Blind Person’s Return to Work Act into law, which would provide incentives for blind people receiving Social Security Disability Insurance to return to work.

The legislation, H.R. 886, is designed to gradually reduce benefits as a blind person’s earnings increase, determine ongoing eligibility based on annual rather than monthly earnings and simplify the way blind recipients can account for work expenses related to their disability.

Categories: Uncategorized

Feds Want to Know How to Effectively Employ People with Disabilities

January 12, 2010 • Darrell Shandrow Hilliker

The U.S. Department of Labor is soliciting ideas from people with disabilities, employers, service providers and advocacy organizations on how to effectively increase the employment of women, veterans and people with disabilities.

Throughout the first three months of 2010, the labor department will hold “Listening Sessions” in Dallas, Texas, Philadelphia, Pa., Chicago, Ill., San Francisco, Calif., Atlanta, Ga. and Boston, Mass. The agency asks that participants register on the A New Day: We’re Listening Web site established especially for these meetings.

Blind accessibility advocates, organizations of the blind and others have an opportunity to advocate for ideas that can lead to greater public awareness of the capabilities of blind people and increased accessibility to the workplace technology that can enable us to achieve and maintain gainful employment.

Categories: employment

Listening to Braille

January 2, 2010 • Darrell Shandrow Hilliker

In the summer of 2009, I was interviewed by Rachel Aviv, a reporter with the New York Times, for a story about Braille literacy. The following in-depth article, published on Dec. 30, contains quotes from me and represents the culmination of a great deal of interesting research on the subject. A plain-text copy of the article has been reproduced below for the purpose of making the material as accessible as possible to all readers.

Listening to Braille

Published: December 30, 2009

AT 4 O’CLOCK each morning, Laura J. Sloate begins her daily reading. She calls a phone service that reads newspapers aloud in a synthetic voice, and she listens to The Wall Street Journal at 300 words a minute, which is nearly twice the average pace of speech. Later, an assistant reads The Financial Times to her while she uses her computer’s text-to-speech system to play The Economist aloud. She devotes one ear to the paper and the other to the magazine. The managing director of a Wall Street investment management firm, Sloate has been blind since age 6, and although she reads constantly, poring over the news and the economic reports for several hours every morning, she does not use Braille. “Knowledge goes from my ears to my brain, not from my finger to my brain,” she says. As a child she learned how the letters of the alphabet sounded, not how they appeared or felt on the page. She doesn’t think of a comma in terms of its written form but rather as “a stop on the way before continuing.” This, she says, is the future of reading for the blind. “Literacy evolves,” she told me. “When Braille was invented, in the 19th century, we had nothing else. We didn’t even have radio. At that time, blindness was a disability. Now it’s just a minor, minor impairment.”

A few decades ago, commentators predicted that the electronic age would create a postliterate generation as new forms of media eclipsed the written word. Marshall McLuhan claimed that Western culture would return to the “tribal and oral pattern.” But the decline of written language has become a reality for only the blind. Although Sloate does regret not spending more time learning to spell in her youth — she writes by dictation — she says she thinks that using Braille would have only isolated her from her sighted peers. “It’s an arcane means of communication, which for the most part should be abolished,” she told me. “It’s just not needed today.”

Braille books are expensive and cumbersome, requiring reams of thick, oversize paper. The National Braille Press, an 83-year-old publishing house in Boston, printed the Harry Potter series on its Heidelberg cylinder; the final product was 56 volumes, each nearly a foot tall. Because a single textbook can cost more than $1,000 and there’s a shortage of Braille teachers in public schools, visually impaired students often read using MP3 players, audiobooks and computer-screen-reading software.

A report released last year by the National Federation of the Blind, an advocacy group with 50,000 members, said that less than 10 percent of the 1.3 million legally blind Americans read Braille. Whereas roughly half of all blind children learned Braille in the 1950s, today that number is as low as 1 in 10, according to the report. The figures are controversial because there is debate about when a child with residual vision has “too much sight” for Braille and because the causes of blindness have changed over the decades — in recent years more blind children have multiple disabilities, because of premature births. It is clear, though, that Braille literacy has been waning for some time, even among the most intellectually capable, and the report has inspired a fervent movement to change the way blind people read. “What we’re finding are students who are very smart, very verbally able — and illiterate,” Jim Marks, a board member for the past five years of the Association on Higher Education and Disability, told me. “We stopped teaching our nation’s blind children how to read and write. We put a tape player, then a computer, on their desks. Now their writing is phonetic and butchered. They never got to learn the beauty and shape and structure of language.”

For much of the past century, blind children attended residential institutions where they learned to read by touching the words. Today, visually impaired children can be well versed in literature without knowing how to read; computer-screen-reading software will even break down each word and read the individual letters aloud. Literacy has become much harder to define, even for educators.

“If all you have in the world is what you hear people say, then your mind is limited,” Darrell Shandrow, who runs a blog called Blind Access Journal, told me. “You need written symbols to organize your mind. If you can’t feel or see the word, what does it mean? The substance is gone.” Like many Braille readers, Shandrow says that new computers, which form a single line of Braille cells at a time, will revive the code of bumps, but these devices are still extremely costly and not yet widely used. Shandrow views the decline in Braille literacy as a sign of regression, not progress: “This is like going back to the 1400s, before Gutenberg’s printing press came on the scene,” he said. “Only the scholars and monks knew how to read and write. And then there were the illiterate masses, the peasants.”

UNTIL THE 19TH CENTURY, blind people were confined to an oral culture. Some tried to read letters carved in wood or wax, formed by wire or outlined in felt with pins. Dissatisfied with such makeshift methods, Louis Braille, a student at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, began studying a cipher language of bumps, called night writing, developed by a French Army officer so soldiers could send messages in the dark. Braille modified the code so that it could be read more efficiently — each letter or punctuation symbol is represented by a pattern of one to six dots on a matrix of three rows and two columns — and added abbreviations for commonly used words like “knowledge,” “people” and “Lord.” Endowed with a reliable method of written communication for the first time in history, blind people had a significant rise in social status, and Louis Braille was embraced as a kind of liberator and spiritual savior. With his “godlike courage,” Helen Keller wrote, Braille built a “firm stairway for millions of sense-crippled human beings to climb from hopeless darkness to the Mind Eternal.”

At the time, blindness was viewed not just as the absence of sight but also as a condition that created a separate kind of species, more innocent and malleable, not fully formed. Some scholars said that blind people spoke a different sort of language, disconnected from visual experience. In his 1933 book, “The Blind in School and Society,” the psychologist Thomas Cutsforth, who lost his sight at age 11, warned that students who were too rapidly assimilated into the sighted world would become lost in “verbal unreality.” At some residential schools, teachers avoided words that referenced color or light because, they said, students might stretch the meanings beyond sense. These theories have since been discredited, and studies have shown that blind children as young as 4 understand the difference in meaning between words like “look,” “touch” and “see.” And yet Cutsforth was not entirely misguided in his argument that sensory deprivation restructures the mind. In the 1990s, a series of brain-imaging studies revealed that the visual cortices of the blind are not rendered useless, as previously assumed. When test subjects swept their fingers over a line of Braille, they showed intense activation in the parts of the brain that typically process visual input.

These imaging studies have been cited by some educators as proof that Braille is essential for blind children’s cognitive development, as the visual cortex takes more than 20 percent of the brain. Given the brain’s plasticity, it is difficult to make the argument that one kind of reading — whether the information is absorbed by ear, finger or retina — is inherently better than another, at least with regard to cognitive function. The architecture of the brain is not fixed, and without images to process, the visual cortex can reorganize for new functions. A 2003 study in Nature Neuroscience found that blind subjects consistently surpassed sighted ones on tests of verbal memory, and their superior performance was caused, the authors suggested, by the extra processing that took place in the visual regions of their brains.

Learning to read is so entwined in the normal course of child development that it is easy to assume that our brains are naturally wired for print literacy. But humans have been reading for fewer than 6,000 years (and literacy has been widespread for no more than a century and a half). The activity of reading itself alters the anatomy of the brain. In a report released in 2009 in the journal Nature, the neuroscientist Manuel Carreiras studies illiterate former guerrillas in Colombia who, after years of combat, had abandoned their weapons, left the jungle and rejoined civilization. Carreiras compares 20 adults who had recently completed a literacy program with 22 people who had not yet begun it. In M.R.I. scans of their brains, the newly literate subjects showed more gray matter in their angular gyri, an area crucial for language processing, and more white matter in part of the corpus callosum, which links the two hemispheres. Deficiencies in these regions were previously observed in dyslexics, and the study suggests that those brain patterns weren’t the cause of their illiteracy, as had been hypothesized, but a result.

There is no doubt that literacy changes brain circuitry, but how this reorganization affects our capacity for language is still a matter of debate. In moving from written to spoken language, the greatest consequences for blind people may not be cognitive but cultural — a loss much harder to avoid. In one of the few studies of blind people’s prose, Doug Brent, a professor of communication at the University of Calgary, and his wife, Diana Brent, a teacher of visually impaired students, analyzed stories by students who didn’t use Braille but rather composed on a regular keyboard and edited by listening to their words played aloud. One 16-year-old wrote a fictional story about a character named Mark who had “sleep bombs”:

He looked in the house windo that was his da windo his dad was walking around with a mask on he took it off he opend the windo and fell on his bed sleeping mark took two bombs and tosed them in the windo the popt his dad lept up but before he could grab the mask it explodedhe fell down asleep.

In describing this story and others like it, the Brents invoked the literary scholar Walter Ong, who argued that members of literate societies think differently than members of oral societies. The act of writing, Ong said — the ability to revisit your ideas and, in the process, refine them — transformed the shape of thought. The Brents characterized the writing of many audio-only readers as disorganized, “as if all of their ideas are crammed into a container, shaken and thrown randomly onto a sheet of paper like dice onto a table.” The beginnings and endings of sentences seem arbitrary, one thought emerging in the midst of another with a kind of breathless energy. The authors concluded, “It just doesn’t seem to reflect the qualities of organized sequence and complex thought that we value in a literate society.”

OUR DEFINITION of a literate society inevitably shifts as our tools for reading and writing evolve, but the brief history of literacy for blind people makes the prospect of change particularly fraught. Since the 1820s, when Louis Braille invented his writing system — so that blind people would no longer be “despised or patronized by condescending sighted people,” as he put it — there has always been, among blind people, a political and even moral dimension to learning to read. Braille is viewed by many as a mark of independence, a sign that blind people have moved away from an oral culture seen as primitive and isolating. In recent years, however, this narrative has been complicated. Schoolchildren in developed countries, like the U.S. and Britain, are now thought to have lower Braille literacy than those in developing ones, like Indonesia and Botswana, where there are few alternatives to Braille. Tim Connell, the managing director of an assistive-technology company in Australia, told me that he has heard this described as “one of the advantages of being poor.”

Braille readers do not deny that new reading technology has been transformative, but Braille looms so large in the mythology of blindness that it has assumed a kind of talismanic status. Those who have residual vision and still try to read print — very slowly or by holding the page an inch or two from their faces — are generally frowned upon by the National Federation of the Blind, which fashions itself as the leader of a civil rights movement for the blind. Its president, Marc Maurer, a voracious reader, compares Louis Braille to Abraham Lincoln. At the annual convention for the federation, held at a Detroit Marriott last July, I heard the mantra “listening is not literacy” repeated everywhere, from panels on the Braille crisis to conversations among middle-school girls. Horror stories circulating around the convention featured children who don’t know what a paragraph is or why we capitalize letters or that “happily ever after” is made up of three separate words.

Declaring your own illiteracy seemed to be a rite of passage. A vice president of the federation, Fredric Schroeder, served as commissioner of the Rehabilitation Services Administration under President Clinton and relies primarily on audio technologies. He was openly repentant about his lack of reading skills. “I am now over 50 years old, and it wasn’t until two months ago that I realized that ‘dissent,’ to disagree, is different than ‘descent,’ to lower something,” he told me. “I’m functionally illiterate. People say, ‘Oh, no, you’re not.’ Yes, I am. I’m sorry about it, but I’m not embarrassed to admit it.”

While people like Laura Sloate or the governor of New York, David A. Paterson, who also reads by listening, may be able to achieve without the help of Braille, their success requires accommodations that many cannot afford. Like Sloate, Paterson dictates his memos, and his staff members select pertinent newspaper articles for him and read them aloud on his voice mail every morning. (He calls himself “overassimilated” and told me that as a child he was “mainstreamed so much that I psychologically got the message that I’m not really supposed to be blind.”) Among people with fewer resources, Braille-readers tend to form the blind elite, in part because it is more plausible for a blind person to find work doing intellectual rather than manual labor.

A 1996 study showed that of a sample of visually impaired adults, those who learned Braille as children were more than twice as likely to be employed as those who had not. At the convention this statistic was frequently cited with pride, so much so that those who didn’t know Braille were sometimes made to feel like outsiders. “There is definitely a sense of peer pressure from the older guard,” James Brown, a 35-year-old who reads using text-to-speech software, told me. “If we could live in our own little Braille world, then that’d be perfect,” he added. “But we live in a visual world.”

When deaf people began getting cochlear implants in the late 1980s, many in the deaf community felt betrayed. The new technology pushed people to think of the disability in a new way — as an identity and a culture. Technology has changed the nature of many disabilities, lifting the burdens but also complicating people’s sense of what is physically natural, because bodies can so often be tweaked until “fixed.” Arielle Silverman, a graduate student at the convention who has been blind since birth, told me that if she had the choice to have vision, she was not sure she would take it. Recently she purchased a pocket-size reading machine that takes photographs of text and then reads the words aloud, and she said she thought of vision like that, as “just another piece of technology.”

The modern history of blind people is in many ways a history of reading, with the scope of the disability — the extent to which you are viewed as ignorant or civilized, helpless or independent — determined largely by your ability to access the printed word. For 150 years, Braille books were designed to function as much as possible like print books. But now the computer has essentially done away with the limits of form, because information, once it has been digitized, can be conveyed through sound or touch. For sighted people, the transition from print to digital text has been relatively subtle, but for many blind people the shift to computerized speech is an unwelcome and uncharted experiment. In grappling with what has been lost, several federation members recited to me various takes on the classic expression Scripta manent, verba volant: What is written remains, what is spoken vanishes into air.

Rachel Aviv is a Rosalynn Carter fellow for mental-health journalism with the Carter Center and writes frequently on education for The Times.

Discussion of this article in the comments is encouraged. How do you feel about Aviv’s portrayal of the NFB convention? How about the comparison of the Braille literacy experience for blind people with resistance against cochlear implants in the deaf community? What are your thoughts on the intriguing medical research quoted in the story? All constructive ideas and opinions are always welcome in the comments to this and all other Blind Access Journal posts. We wish all our loyal readers a happy New Year and a better, more accessible 2010.