Are Reading Technologies Preventing the Blind from Reading?: Lindsay Harris

Lindsay Harris

You may not have noticed, but the number of people with severe visual impairments is on the rise.

Technology seems to be one reason why. Technology allows the youngest (premature babies) and the oldest of us to survive circumstances we previously would not have, but often at the expense of our eyesight.

Severe visual impairments prevent reading the way that most of us are used to – with our peepers.

One might think that if technology is a cause of rising rates of visual impairments, it might also be the answer to removing barriers to literacy for people with visual impairments. Indeed, there are many technologies that enable people with such visual impairments to access the same information as sighted individuals. These include screen readers and audiobooks.

However, in part because of these technologies, people with visual impairments are not learning Braille, the system of reading using raised dots on paper which correspond to letters, in the numbers they used to.

According to the National Federation of the Blind, fewer than 10% of the legally blind in the United States use Braille today. It is often considered much easier to use technology than to teach Braille.
This concerns CISLL’s Deputy Director Dr. Lindsay Harris, who specializes in word learning.

“When people read, they are strengthening the networks in the brain that encode word meanings,” explains Harris. “People who read a lot are able to experience more shades of meaning than people who do not, because more areas of the brain are wired into their mental dictionaries. Having richer “entries” in the dictionary allows them to become better readers.”

The reason is that they can place more attention on what is being described by the language and pay less attention to the words themselves.

Dr. Harris has been doing innovative research to answer the question, “If blind individuals are not reading, what consequences will there be on their knowledge of words and their language comprehension?”

In her recent research, sighted and blind individuals (who can read Braille) learn the definitions of rare words – essentially new words.

“We have sighted and blind participants read or hear a new word before they are given the definition. Research on sighted individuals show that reading a word helps them to learn its definition more easily than just hearing it.”

The reason is that when people read, they often experience hearing the words in their minds. But when people hear a word, they do not typically see the spelling in their heads to the same degree. Having both codes – phonological (word sounds) and orthographic (word spellings) – helps people find the definitions in memory. It is like finding your keychain in your purse; the more keys there are, the easier it is to find.

If blind individuals show the same pattern as sighted individuals—learning words more quickly when they are read versus when they are heard—then this could indicate that the visually impaired who do not read in favor of technology are losing some of those “shades of meaning” compared to individuals who read, and are potentially limiting the size of their vocabularies.

However, the results might show that blind individuals, unlike sighted individuals, do better when hearing the new words, because they tend to have superior verbal memory and phonological abilities.

“If the blind participants do better after hearing the words, then this would suggest that the newer technologies for the visually impaired are no cause for alarm with regards to language processing,” explained Harris.

Either finding will inform educational practices.

Unfortunately, we will have to wait until Dr. Harris finishes her research to find whether sighted and blind individuals show similar patterns of word learning.

Although she has already collected data from 17 sighted and 23 blind individuals, “I need more participants in my study,” says Harris. “One challenge of doing this research is finding blind individuals who read Braille.” She is hopeful that by the spring she will have enough data to begin analyses.

Dr. Harris is currently working on writing a federally funded grant to continue this and similar lines of research.