Seeing With My Fingers

Seeing With My Fingers, a photo by Cobra_11 on Flickr.

Learning Braille is going quite nicely. Learning to write was a piece of cake. I'm building up on the speed of writing every day. Practicing reading, however, is a bit trickier. Since I'm learning "blind reading", I'm only using my sense of touch to feel the little bumps in the paper. I got the hang of it quite quickly, but I still need a lot of practice before I'll be able to read fluently.

Unlike with the visible writing with a pen, where you just use one hand to write and no hands at all to read, you need to use both hands with Braille. When writing Braille, you have to feel the cells in the slate with one hand and write with the other. With reading you need to use one hand to read and the other to mark the next line. I read with the fingers of my right hand and I mark the next lines with my left.

Another challenge with reading is that my sense of touch is not particularly sharp, since I've never had to use it before for feeling such delicate things as bumps of Braille writing. However, the more I practise, the sharper my sense of touch gets.

I must say that seeing with my fingers is quite a challenge, but I'm getting better every day.