Today, the 4^th of January, people across the globe observe World Braille Day. The day is celebrated each year in honor of Louis Braille, who became blind as a young child and invented the system in the 1800s.

World Braille Day, celebrated since 2019, is observed to raise awareness of the importance of Braille as a means of communication in the full realization of the human rights for blind and partially sighted people. Braille is essential in the context of education, freedom of expression and opinion, as well as social inclusion, as reflected in article 2 of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

Braille is a system of raised dots used for reading and writing by people who are blind or severely visually impaired. Itis read with the fingertips, although with practice people with sight can read it with their eyes. Letters, numbers, punctuation marks and numerous other symbols can be written with Braille. Each letter or symbol is formed by a special pattern of dots known as a Braille cell, which resembles a six on dice. Letters and characters are written with a combination of these dots.

Some facts about Braille:

1. Braille started out as a military code called “night writing.” Developed in 1819 by the French army, soldiers used it to communicate at night without speaking or using candles. Fifteen-year-old French schoolboy Louis Braille learned about the code, and eventually developed the more usable, streamlined version of the braille alphabet we know today.
2. Braille takes up more space than the traditional alphabet, which is why braille books are much larger than their counterparts. For example, “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” is 10 volumes in braille, and the “Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary” is 72 volumes.
3. Braille is not a language. It’s a tactile alphabet that can be used to write almost any language. There are braille versions of Chinese, Spanish, Arabic, Hebrew, and many others.
4. Ever heard of the Braille Challenge? An annual competition for students who are blind, the Braille Institute hosts more than 1,400 students from the U.S. and Canada to test their braille skills. 
5. There’s a special version of braille just for mathematics called the Nemeth Code. It was invented by Dr. Abraham Nemeth and can be used to transcribe math, algebra, and calculus.
6. There are several children’s toys that feature braille. In recent years, toy companies have made strides in ensuring every child can play some of the biggest classic family games, such as braille Uno, braille and low vision Monopoly and braille LEGO.  

Why write about this specific system, that is so important to the many vision impaired/blind students that exist all over the world? The answer lays in this fact:” Vision is intimately involved with 70% to 80% of all tasks that occur in our educational programs” … (From “Teaching Students with Special Needs in Inclusive Settings”, p.331)

How can we “define” Visual Impairments?

Several different terms are associated with the concept of visual impairment:

• Blindness is the term used when a student must use Braille or aural methods to receive instruction
• Low vision is used when some functional vision exists and in which case the student can be instructed with other optical or electronical devices.

There are degrees of visual impairments; the greater the visual loss the more significant impact this will have on educational, social, and physical abilities for the student; several difficulties arise for these students in an academic setting:

• Attention and Focus span differs, it can be longer for visual impaired students.
• Problems with visual memory and concept development.
• Delayed acquisition of vocabulary and limited visual cues, which leads to:
• Delayed acquisition of reading, writing and math skills, as well as reading comprehension and math computation
• For these students using spatial information is extremely difficult which makes their movements from place to place an uphill battle.

Going over the previous list of some of the difficulties that students with visual impairments face, makes me wonder how aware we are about our own capacity to “see” …Recently, I watched a series on TV called “In the Dark” (I am not trying to “sell” you the story by the way). It was about a girl that went blind when she was 14; at 25, after several years of being blind, she was not able to recall an image of people she had known and obviously seen before she went blind; she also had developed, for herself, a technique to "write” notes on flashcards with acrylic paint, kind of a “personalized braille” but with lines, not with dots. She had had the experience of “being able to see" but that did not make her life any easier once she lost her sight, in fact she had difficulties ‘remembering’ certain things, including faces of her loved ones. 

While I watched the program this question popped up: “can we, as teachers, even as ordinary people really relate to the blind? There is this saying in the country where I grew up, ( Iam sure it exists in other languages/countries too) “you don’t ‘appreciate’ certain things in life until you lose them”…so let’s pause for a moment to think about all the things that are so much easier or at least not so difficult, for those who are able to ‘see’ what they do, just simple day to day activities like pouring out a glass of water when thirsty or where they are going when moving around the house..

As a Montessori teacher, from the moment I read about today’s commemoration “Worlds Braille Day” I started to “make a list” of all the things that I would do in the classroom if I had a visually impaired student…for example, regarding movement, at any level that is: gross motor skills or fine motor skills; they happen in coordination with our ability to see… so here are some interesting facts about the Montessori Method:

1. One of the things that Maria Montessori wrote a great deal about was how ‘movement” is closely related to the development of "higher functions of the mind” as she called it… “Watching a child makes it obvious that the development of his mind comes about through his movements. Mind and movement are parts of the same entity”. —Maria Montessori (1967a/1995,p. 142).  “The basic insight regarding the connection between the brain or mind and movement is fundamental to Montessori education” … (Lillard, Angeline Stoll. Montessori (p. 39). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition)….so if the gross motor area is, so to speak, ‘compromised’, in a Montessori Classroom, we would have to adapt the arrangements of furniture, but we could also think about assigning one of the students the task of giving verbal notice on how to find the materials needed to work with; in a Montessori classroom students learn with manipulatives in steps, and students in different age groups can be paired in these assignments.

2. Regarding  the use of materials in the Sensorial Area of a Montessori classroom, tracing Sandpaper Letters, tracing geometric shapes with one’s finger and in the process, creating wrist movements, running a delicate wooden stick around the borders of leaf shapes, picking up cylinders by their small knobs to strengthen the pincer muscles, tracing the insides of Metal Insets to educate the hand, arranging objects and moving cards that state each object’s name near it, and moving cardboard letters to form words, etc. are used by regular students, but , can also be used by visually impaired students, am I right?  Yes, it is true that it would maybe take them longer for those who cannot “see” what they are holding or tracing, but within the Sensorial exercises Montessori designed what she called “material with the purpose of discriminating the senses”: “The study of a child’s psychological development must be bound up with the study of his hand’s activities…. Those children who have been able to work with their hands make headway in their development”.

— Maria Montessori (1967a/1995, p. 152)

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Sensory discrimination is an exceedingly important ability that we tend to take for granted, and when we then think of the visually impaired child, it seems only natural that they would certainly benefit from a Montessori environment. Sandpaper letters would 'work’ as the lines made by acrylic paint on the flashcards of the blind girl in the series; tracing metal insets would strengthen the pinch grip and ‘the movement of  little fingers on fine dots with braille; “feeling "objects such as beads, helps them count; the movable alphabet facilitates the notion of the ‘form’ that makes some letters unique…I could go on, in fact, one of the most interesting things about Montessori is that many of her  ideas for working with, and educating children originate from her work with Édouard Séguin, a French psychologist who developed a methodical approach of presenting lessons by breaking them down into small, sequential steps. Working primarily with children who were blind, Séguin developed a collection of hands-on learning materials. Due in part to her work with Séguin, Montessori developed her method and materials to encourage children to learn using all their senses, rather than relying strictly on their vision. Anne Sullivan used Montessori’s model of education with her student, Helen Keller: “Helen Keller is a marvelous example of the phenomenon common to all human beings: "the possibility of the liberation of the imprisoned spirit of man by the education of the senses.” (Maria Montessori, Dr. Montessori’s Own Handbook, p. 25.)

Children who are visually impaired or blind are not helpless. Like all children, they want to be able to do things independently. “He who is served is limited in his independence” (The Montessori Method, p. 97).  It is not only a matter of offering the visually impaired student the opportunity to acquire knowledge within the Montessori classroom, but also a way for them to be more independent, maybe even in the same way as regular students!

In the United States alone, it is estimated that only about 10 percent of people who are blind know the Braille system. The exact number is uncertain, but a study from the National Federation for the Blind estimates that in the case of school-aged children, only 10 percent are taught Braille. This is due to a variety of factors, including a lack of teachers, increased use of audio books and technology, and difficulties mastering the system because of things like additional disabilities. Still, many people learn basic Braille symbols in order to be able to read signs and label things.