Braille competition encourages literacy

SALT LAKE CITY — Ellie Serrano says she started learning braille at the age of 2 and was reading braille by the time she was 5. She calls her "little nifty fingers" her most important reading tool.

Now at the ripe old age of 9, Ellie competed on Friday in an annual braille competition designed to help blind or visually impaired kids ages 6 to 18 improve their skills. Blind since birth, Ellie says braille is important "because if I couldn't read, I wouldn't be able to, you know, get around much. Because you have to read a lot in life."

The Utah Foundation for the Blind and Visually Impaired, which sponsored Friday's event, says only 30 percent of blind adults gain full-time employment, but 90 percent of those who beat the odds are braille readers.

"It's extremely fundamental, and we're here to help improve braille skills and encourage students to be better braille readers, be more efficient at what they do, apply it to more aspects of their lives," said Tony Jepson, executive director of the Utah foundation.

Fernando Cabana, at 15, uses text-to-speech software on his computer to navigate the Internet but has been learning braille since he was 7. "I like to read braille novels, or I like to read my textbooks in braille as well, even though I only have one textbook in braille at school, which is my Spanish braille book," he said.

He had just finished a speed and accuracy challenge in Friday's competition, listening to a story on a Victor Reader — a sort of MP3 player on steroids — that can digest electronic documents and convert them to speech. He and other students then transcribed from the story on their Perkins Braille Writer machines, a typewriter-like machine that punches the braille dots on paper.

"Pretty much you compete to see how good you are," Fernando said of the competition. "It's just fun to come and hang out and read braille as well, but it's also fun to hang out with friends."

Getting kids together is one of the competition's objectives, Jepson said. "Most of these kids are the only blind student in their school. So this is a way for them to come in, be with each other, compare their braille skills with each other and interact with each other — talk to each other about situations that arise in their lives at school and elsewhere that they just can't do with students who aren't blind."

Ellie said she not only knows how to use her Perkins brailler, she knows what makes it work. "I pretty much know what's inside the brailler because I reach in there just to get a little bit of oil and grease on my fingers sometimes."