Finishing Up Braille

Sarah has finished up learning her Braille alphabet yesterday. She does a great job on the braille writer (which is just a typewriter for blind persons). She is doing a pretty good job reading it as well. It will take some time to become proficient, but she will accomplish it for certain.

Once we have learned the alphabet proficiently she will then move on to something called contracted braille which is what most books are written in as it would take too long to write a book using each individual braille letter. Contracted braille is just where a combination of the 6 cells equal a word instead of a letter. (You can see below for an example.)

It will take us quite a long time to learn braille proficiently. I was given the estimate of about 2 years by a teacher for the blind. We are about 6 months in and the estimate that we were given seems about right.

Sarah misses reading more than anything which keeps her motivated to keep moving forward even when she gets stuck or frustrated when she gets stuck on a letter.

We will get through this little by little. I will not lie though - every time we work on Braille I say a little prayer that someday she won't need this anymore because she will be reading with her own eyes again.

Courtesy of: google.com

Sarah has learned all of these letters and in approximately another month will be able to read them proficiently. 

Courtesy of: google.com

This is what we will be moving on to next and will take up the bulk of our time.