The Alphabetic Braille and Contracted Braille Study examined the reading and writing skills of young braille-reading students. Students who were introduced to more contractions earlier in instruction performed better on reading measures, such as vocabulary, decoding, and comprehension, but all students did well in spelling. Thus, the authors…

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…

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…