Study showing reading Braille leads to happiness makes me smile

Our friend Ellen Sandmeyer had us over for Christmas Eve this year. Her two sons, her nine-year-old granddaughter Kaia and Kaia’s mom had flown in for the holidays, and we spent the evening together munching cookies, sipping drinks, sharing stories, and…learning Braille.

When I called ahead to make sure no one had allergies or a fear of dogs and it was okay to bring Whitney along, Ellen said they were really hoping we’d bring her. “We all read Safe & Sound together last night,” she said. “Kaia wants to meet your dog.”

My fan in Wisconsin wrote the Braille, and her teacher wrote in the standard characters and words.

My school presentations over the years have shown me kids love Seeing Eye dogs. They are intrigued with Braille, too, so I brought the Braille version of Safe & Sound along, too. Print letters appear below the Brailled words, so Kaia could read the print/Braille version along with me and help me when I struggled with words like “harness” and “unbuckled.”

Reading and writing of Braille is something of a dying art. Audio books are far easier to find than books written in Braille. Apps that convert written text into audio are more common — and less expensive — than apps that convert print into Braille, and these days only 20 percent of blind children in this country learn to read Braille.

I know what you’re thinking. With all that affordable audio technology, why teach any kid Braille? Well, technology is cool, but if all they do is listen to text, how will these children ever learn to spell correctly? How will they know where to put commas, quotation marks, paragraph breaks and so on?

I didn’t lose my sight until I was 26 years old, so I was fortunate to learn all of that when I could still read print. I’m not proficient in Braille now, but the little I know sure comes in handy when I want to confirm what floor I’m on when I get off an elevator or to label CDs, file folders and buttons on electronic devices at home. I can read Safe & Sound, too, but not very quickly. During visits to elementary schools teachers assure me I needn’t apologize for my poor Braille — reading skills. “It’s good for the kids to see a grown-up working so hard to try to read — it convinces them to try hard to read, too.”

And then there’s this: Research shows that reading Braille makes you happier. A recent study of 443 legally blind adults found that braille literacy is key to life satisfaction for blind individuals regardless of what age they become blind or how much residual vision they have left.

Arielle Michal Silverman, Ph.D., one of the two authors of the study, is the founder of Disability Wisdom Consulting in Silver Spring, Maryland. She regularly uses Braille for work and says Braille hasn’t been replaced by technology, but it helps her to use technology. Without Braille, she says, reading the speeches she gives for presentations at work would be impossible. “Knowing Braille from a young age has given me the literacy skills to follow my professional and personal dreams.”

Silverman, 33, was born blind and learned Braille as a child. She says some of her friends with visual impairments were not offered classes in Braille, even though they were legally entitled to it. “That made me really sad,” she said. “For me, Braille was such a joyous thing.”

I got a taste of Braille joy this past autumn when a student in Wisconsin wrote me a letter in Braille to let me know she’d just finished reading Safe & Sound. My book about Seeing Eye dogs was the first Braille book she ever read — now that’s an honor!

“I have not been visually-impaired for very long,” she wrote, explaining she’d lost most of her vision after being diagnosed with a rare type of brain cancer when she was eleven years old. Her Braille letter was beautiful –straight long lines of “fresh” Braille that’s easy to feel with my fingertips. Here’s some of what she said there:

I’ve been working on learning Braille for 4 years. I would like to write you from time to time if you would enjoy writing me back. Maybe it will help to improve my Braille skills.

Thank you again for writing this book! I’m wondering if you have a dog right now. One day I would like to work towards getting one too.

We do send Braille notes back and forth between Wisconsin and Illinois now, and her Braille teacher tells me that receiving mail from her Braille buddy leaves her student “grinning ear to ear.”

What a coincidence.