Learning To Appreciate Braille

My secondary school, Maktab Sultan Abu Bakar, better known as English College, had a special education unit that catered to visually impaired students. I used to watch them carry their individual Braille typewriters around and wondered how they used them in classes. Back then, my study life was filled with back-to-back extracurricular activities. I never had the chance to properly sit down and learn about Braille and appreciate its importance in supplementing visually impaired individuals with the opportunities to understand the world. Fortunately, that ended today.

My team and I got off the Monorail at Jalan Tun Sambanthan, to arrive at the headquarters of Pertubuhan Pembangunan Orang Buta Malaysia (PPOBM, or Society for the Advancement of the Blind) for a ceremony officiating their new Braille library. The organisation was established to support the socio-economic development of visually impaired communities, regardless of race and class. This is made possible through the provision of educational courses and community services, entrepreneurial empowerment and career support, and enhanced access to educational materials in Braille, among others.

We kicked off the day by packing 10 goodies bags with household supplies our volunteers had purchased from the day before. It included a wide range of necessities from dry food to cleaning supplies, all of which were generously sponsored. The lights in our temporary packing room were switched off for some good 10 minutes during the packing session and we had to resort to using our phone flashlight, thinking the power circuit went out. How inconvenient! However, it was later discovered that no one outside the room had realised our lights were wrongly switched off. You see, there were mostly visually impaired individuals at the centre. The sudden realisation that we had assumed everyone could see the light was embarrassing.  

As the team completed the tasks to package goodies bags, we were invited to visit the ‘Publication Room’, where fresh Braille books were being compiled. While professionally printed and bundled books in Braille are extremely expensive, PPOBM has been sponsored an industrial typewriter machine, which could efficiently type Braille on papers. In the current market, some publishing companies give free copyright access for their publications to be translated into Braille. Organisations like PPOBM then produce free Braille copies for the benefit of their members or anyone who would drop by to use their literary resources.

As their collection piled up, PPOBM decided to establish a library with all their Braille books, to encourage the visually-impaired communities to gather and enjoy the literary world, in turn contributing to higher reading and literacy rates. The air-conditioned room-turned-library has simple tables and chairs, as well as half-filled bookshelves. I learned that there are plans to use the space to conduct seminars and forums for the community, which would be a space allowing freedom of speech, exchange of opinions and educational sharing to be conducted.

One of my fellow volunteers was an expert in financial literacy and had more than a decade of experience in promoting scam awareness. When all gathered in the library, she took the chance to launch what future seminars would look like by leading a sharing on common scam tactics today. On top of introducing investment scams, love scams and mule accounts, the session also reminded all to call the National Scam Response Centre at 977 if they discovered that they have been scammed. 

Shortly after, we were offered the opportunity to try their portable Braille typewriters, which are the devices I had seen my schoolmates carrying around. Small as they look, they cost around RM6k each! How do they work? There are a total of six keys on the device; alphabet letters are typed on paper by pressing different combinations of keys simultaneously. To assist beginners in identifying the 24-pair combinations, PPOBM displayed their respective number codes on the wall. As much as the codes are helpful, I couldn’t help but think about the fact that Braille users had to memorise them by heart to recognise the alphabet. 

Braille was first used during the Napoleonic war times when officials had to exchange confidential information. While most common typewriters today use a six-dot system, some languages like German and French require an eight-dot system. The same dot combinations could have different meanings in English and other languages. Braille readers need to programme their minds to recognise what language is being read first, or confusion would be frequent. Additionally, each dot combination or letter is better known as a ‘cell’. Each line on an A4 paper can only accommodate 32 ‘cells’, sized 2.5mm each.

Today’s session was eye-opening for me, as I had the chance to experience how Braille works and learn about the incredible work PPOBM is undertaking to provide more community support and reading materials for the visually impaired. Hearing stories from other visually impaired volunteers with PPOBM, I learned that their world is not too different from ours. They might have no chance to appreciate colours and visuals, yet they work harder than most of us and still fight so hard to understand our world. Thanks to blind-friendly infrastructure such as textured walkways and Braille buttons in lifts, they can attend to many professional occupations, just like anyone else. It is up to us to lend a helping hand where we can and even advocate for the learning and use of Braille to help make this world a more inclusive place!  

By,

Euan Thum