To determine the attitudes of teachers of students who are visually impaired or blind about the use of contracted or uncontracted Braille for emergent readers, the author posted a questionnaire on three electronic listservs from October through December 2002 and received responses from 40 teachers in India, Canada, the West Indies, and the United…

Six primary school-aged braille students were taught to name 4 to 10 braille letters as phonemes and another 4 to 10 braille letters as graphemes (Study 1). They were then taught to name 10 braille words as onset-rimes and another 10 braille words as whole words (Study 2). Instruction in phonemes and onset rimes resulted in fewer trials and a…

This article reports on a national survey and follow-up interviews with vision-support teachers. The study related to pupils in mainstream schools who are identified as able to read large print but also need to learn braille to increase access to the curriculum. The aim of the survey was to elicit information about the diversity of the group and…

This study compared the length of text in English Braille American Edition, the Nemeth code, and the computer braille code with the Unified English Braille Code (UEBC)--also known as Unified English Braille (UEB). The findings indicate that differences in the length of text are dependent on the type of material that is transcribed and the grade…

Reading development is said to progress in a series of developmental skills and stages that need to be acquired by emerging young readers. The literature on Greek braille reading and its development found that print readers opt for the same text decoding strategy even at the initial stages of development. This article explores the development of…

Two groups of sighted pre-school children were taught to name six braille letters: one group received phoneme instruction and the other grapheme instruction. Ten boys and ten girls (average age 4:5 years) participated. There was a statistically significant advantage for the phoneme group (Experiment 1). In a repeated measures design, 16 sighted…

This article analyzes the braille spelling errors of 16 Greek students who are blind. More specifically, it explores the types of spelling errors, the students' attitudes toward spelling, and the relationship between spelling and reading strategies.

An account is given of a new research project that is concerned with examining the problems encountered by some young blind children as they learn to read braille. The research to be conducted will look at various developmental and learning theories that are used to explain the reading difficulties of sighted readers, with a view to ascertaining…

This is the fourth edition of the Directory of Services for Blind and Visually Handicapped Children in New York State. The directory is a compilation of schools, organizations, agencies, and programs that provide services and information to children who are legally blind and their families in New York State. It is divided into 12 sections: (1)…

This is the first of a two-part report of a study on the instruction of children who were learning or using braille and print simultaneously (dual media). It explores the demographic characteristics of teachers and students, aspects of the decision-making process for providing instruction in dual media, and attitudes of students and parents toward…

The Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, per Section 162.1136 RSMo, conducts an annual study of the educational status of eligible blind/visually impaired students and reports the findings to the Missouri Legislature on December 1st each year. The information contained in this report pertains to the twelve data elements…

Focus-group research conducted on Unified English Braille highlights the diversity of views about the desirability of the new code and its proposed changes. Many features seen by students as positive were the same features deemed undesirable by other students. In general, teachers were more amenable to the changes than were students. Nearly all…

This article compares the development of print and braille reading in children who are blind and sighted in relation to Chall's stage model of reading development. Chall's model includes a prereading period, in which concepts are developed; middle stages, in which skills that are necessary for decoding text are developed; and later stages, which…

This article describes the Early Braille Readers Project, which provided a Mountbatten Pro Brailler and peripheral equipment to 20 kindergarteners, first-, and second graders in Texas. The project included training and support in the form of site visits and teacher training for both teachers of students with visual impairments and classroom…

The National Center for Accessible Media has developed a technology and protocol for inserting extended, enhanced descriptions of visually based concepts into artificially paused digital video. These "eDescriptions" describe material not fully explained by a narrator and provide analogies and explanation specifically designed for…