Few blind people use Braille, and fewer visually impaired children learning it

CHICAGO — Justin Egle was born at 23 weeks, before his retinas had a chance to fully develop, leaving him totally blind.

Now 13, the Glenview, Ill., boy has fallen behind academically — and his mother believes it's because he hasn't received adequate Braille training. His school offers him 40 minutes of Braille instruction four days a week.

"They have mislabeled him as retarded, but the problem isn't that he can't learn ... it's that he never got the skills needed to be a good reader. I constantly ran into roadblocks," said Tina Egle, who now takes her son to a private Braille tutor.

By all accounts, Justin Egle's experience is not unusual. Fewer than 10 percent of the 1.3 million legally blind Americans read Braille, the system of raised dots that has represented the alphabet to the visually impaired for almost two centuries. Moreover, just 10 percent of children are learning the system compared to more than 50 percent during its heyday in the 1950s, according to a recent report by the National Federation for the Blind.

"Either people aren't learning it, they don't have access to it, or they just don't have enough faith in it," said Chris Danielsen, representative for the Baltimore-based group.

The report ticks off a multitude of reasons why Braille is in decline, from a shortage of qualified teachers to mainstreaming in money-strapped schools to parents who discourage kids from learning it in favor of voice-recognition software, audio-texts and other technology. One point is clear: Without Braille literacy, the chances of pursuing higher education and better-paying jobs are greatly reduced, advocates say. Even before the recession, the unemployment rate among blind adults hovered around 70 percent.

"I challenge anyone to learn geometry from an audio text," said Barbara Perkis, director of the Illinois Instructional Materials Center at the Chicago Lighthouse on the city's near West Side.

The 125,000-volume collection furnishes textbooks for any visually impaired student in the state and has served as a national model since its inception in 1965.

While Perkis doesn't see Braille vanishing any time soon, she laments the gaps in instruction for many of the state's 3,600 visually-impaired students.

While there are some "amazingly dedicated" teachers, they frequently must shuttle long distances between school districts and are only available at certain times, making scheduling a tricky proposition.

"Consistency can be a real problem," she acknowledged.