All his life, Robert Englebretson has been a bookworm.
He was a good kid. But he often bent the rules for this early love.
"One of the cool things about braille is that you could sneak a book under your covers and not need a flashlight — and you wouldn't get caught," Englebretson recalls.
Braille is a tactile writing system of raised dots, primarily read by those who are blind or have low vision. The CDC estimates that nearly 3% of people under 18 in the U.S. are blind or visually impaired, which means millions of kids and teenagers could read braille.
To read braille is powerful.
Braille literacy is directly linked to higher rates of academic success and better employment outcomes for blind and low vision adults. Every year, the Braille Challenge, a national braille literacy contest, encourages students to fine-tune their skills.
But there's a problem.
The U.S. is facing a national shortage of qualified braille teachers. Each state has different requirements for braille literacy, so some students are getting less than two to three hours of instruction a week.
As Englebretson continued his education and pursued a career in linguistics, he could not shake the injustice of that reality.
"Reading is a basic human right. Literacy is a basic human right. And that is just as true for blind people as it is for sighted people," says Englebretson, who is now the director of undergraduate studies in linguistics at Rice University.
But to improve braille education, Englebretson needed a team – one made up of researchers in other fields.
That's why, for years, Englebretson has been working with cognitive neuroscientist Simon Fischer-Baum, also at Rice University, and Cay Holbrook, a professor at the University of British Columbia and longtime educator of teachers of the visually impaired.
Together, the group is talking to teachers and students, and pursuing research questions. Their hope is to advance braille research – and ultimately transform braille education.
"Our goal is to have every student who is going to be a braille reader to have direct, ongoing and consistent instruction by a qualified teacher of the visually impaired," said Holbrook.
Read some of the team's work here:
- Englebretson R, Holbrook MC, Fischer-Baum S. A position paper on researching braille in the cognitive sciences: decentering the sighted norm. Applied Psycholinguistics. 2023.
- Englebretson, R., Holbrook, M.C., Treiman, R. et al. The primacy of morphology in English braille spelling: an analysis of bridging contractions. Morphology. 2024.
Interested in hearing more linguistics stories? Email us at shortwave@npr.org.
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This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson and Rebeca Ramirez, edited by Rebecca and fact-checked by Emily Kwong. The audio engineer was Kwesi Lee.
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