The authors review their work on the role of attentional variables, such as in exploratory hand movements, selection and pickup of haptic shape information in the education of blind students. Efforts to design a technology to permit unobtrusive study of hand movements during braille reading and to link observed differences in scanning to reading ability, comprehension, and stimulus properties (including orthography, syntactic, and linguistic features of the text) are described. A study involving microanalysis of 18 braille readers revealed consistency in hand movement patterns, with better readers using two headed styles more often than one handed styles. Results confirmed that hand movements in braille reading can be reduced to a finite number of microcounts, based on direction and duration of the movement across the braille cell. Larger movement units, such as regressing motions and fixations, appeared to vary with the reader's ability and differences in the stimulus. (CL)