“In all my years as a braille tutor (and that’s a good few), attempting to teach over the internet on a daily basis has to be the weirdest and most difficult challenge I have faced, especially since we had to shut the college quickly and there was very little time to prepare. Not all students have braillers, nor do they all have good space in which to work. Add to that, I am vision-impaired as well as them which means that while some of my colleagues are reading braille by means of photographs, this is not an option for me! So, what do we do?

Inevitably, my students are at different stages in their braille learning. For those who are practising reading skills having learned the braille literary code, they can either read from hard copy or from their Orbit 20 reader if they have one, and I can follow on my Orbit. Those still in the process of learning have taken books home or been sent work sheets which we can read together and continue with learning.

Writing – and checking this – is more problematic. If a student has an Orbit reader, they can write on their machine and then in most cases they can (when taught how to) send their file to me by email, I can mark and correct it and send it back to them. If a student writes on a Perkins we have to adopt a more laborious method of checking by description. Although students remember dot patterns in all sorts of ways, I always teach the numbering system – which is proving most useful now. If I want to check whether or not a student has a letter or sign correct I will ask them to tell me the dot numbers.

Braille lessons, although not “normal” by any means, are still happening in Lockdown, and whilst we may have to slow the pace, we do not have to neglect braille by any means.”

S. J. Potter
2 June 2020