Maths, like any other language, relies on visual cues to convey information. In fact, mathematical symbols that can be included in the ‘text,’ such as the addition and subtraction operational signs, fractions, exponents etc. have a specific visual form, and can be presented in a non-linear form - unlike the alphabet. While this is essential to the understanding of maths, it poses a hurdle in making a lot of mathematical information accessible.

This is where Braille comes in - specifically, the Nemeth Braille Code for Mathematics for encoding mathematical and scientific notation linearly using standard six-dot Braille cells. The code was developed by Abraham Nemeth in 1952, and is widely used today, along with being incorporated into the Unified English Braille (UEB) code.

Here’s 5 ways the Nemeth Code, and Braille’s particular strengths, can make learning maths easier!

1. Nemeth is a standard code

The Nemeth code offers a set of standard notations for numerals and mathematical symbols in the commonly-used Arabic numerals. This allows the information implicitly indicated in the arrangements of the text to be made explicit, without needing to rely on sight to interpret them.

By offering an easily accessible code that retains the form of Braille, Nemeth also allows visually impaired learners to read numbers and mathematical texts without needing to learn a new script. The tactile form of the script also makes understanding different mathematical forms, such as shapes and graphs, an easily transferable skill from reading alphabetical texts.

2. Texts in Nemeth can be easily created

Writing in Nemeth code is no different from writing the Braille alphabet - it uses, by and large, the same tools. The familiarity with the tactile code also means visually impaired people can use tools like the Graphic Aid for Mathematics.

Braille math materials can often also be created from electronic files with Braille translation software such as the Duxbury Braille Translator. MathML or LaTex, two very popular markup languages for mathematics, can also be translated to Nemeth Code using Braille translation software.

3. Nemeth makes it easier to depict complex equations

Having the computer pronounce a formula for you is not adequate for a blind reader, any more than it would be adequate for a sighted reader. For complex mathematical problems, tactile devices can easily take the place of pencil and paper and speed up calculations greatly - Braille slates and writers are still popular and useful tools for teaching math.  Pioneers such as Benjamin Smith did a great deal of work on teaching arithmetic on the Braille writer. Some systems also offer a number of different techniques for browsing equations, each of which present the structure as well as the content of the mathematics.

Computers began to be introduced into classrooms with visually impaired learners in the 1960s, to much success. Maths teachers today employ modified computer applications, tactile graphics, talking calculators capable of graphing calculus problems, tactile measuring tools and talking money identifiers.

4. Nemeth is easily readable by humans and computers

The Nemeth Braille code makes mathematical work written in any language to be easily translated, as well as communicated - by hand or computer. This is particularly useful for visually impaired students to have simultaneous access to both the printed Braille and an online version. Computer applications, scientific calculators and other technological tools in use today incorporate Braille, as well as make it possible to read mathematical works on refreshable Braille displays.

5. Nemeth allows a multisensory approach to learning maths in Braille

Numbers come in all shapes and sizes in our lives - we count and calculate all the time, whether it’s the time we have left to get a job done, or balancing the ingredients when we’re cooking a meal. This is no different for those with visual impairments, and bringing those experiences to their learning makes it a more enriching experience.

Multisensory, and hence multimodal learning, that engages several of the learners’ senses is now a vital part of education. It’s no different for Braille learning. Visually impaired students are generally well-trained in such multisensory learning, owing to their reliance on touch and sound to participate in the classrooms. This means that learners have the opportunity to learn mathematics the same way they would learn about anything else they come across - through direct experience.

At Thinkerbell Labs, we bring all of these strengths of the Nemeth Braille code to Annie, our innovation in Braille self-learning. By learning to read, write, and type numbers and mathematical operations through Braille lessons that incorporate their everyday experiences, mathematics is no longer some magical unknown - it’s familiar, and knowable.

Through Braille’s long and varied history, many countries designed their own Braille codes to meet the needs of their languages and cultures. It’s no surprise, then, that this has sometimes meant inconsistencies in the script across the world. The uneven spread of Braille in Europe and North America, and its later introduction in Australia and other countries, has meant that these countries had each adopted different versions of English Braille.

These differences had previously made it difficult to have a standard form of English Braille. This was especially problematic when it came to crossing national barriers with technical codes and literary texts. Unified English Braille, or UEB, is the unified Braille script that’s designed to remove these barriers for good.

The History of UEB

The foundations for UEB were laid in a 1991 memo written by Braille pioneers T. V. Cranmer and Abraham Nemeth, where they recognize the eroding use of Braille across the English-speaking world. They worried that Braille would become “a secondary means of written communication among the blind, or that it [would] become obsolete altogether,” a significant factor of which was “the complexity and disarray into which the Braille system has now evolved.” This made it especially difficult for young learners, who may have to learn several different Braille codes to read and write, work on their computer, or use their calculator. A uniform Braille system aimed to take the best of the individual codes and combine the changed codes into a single standard.

In 1993, the Braille Authority of North America (BANA) and the International Council on English Braille (ICEB) began development of the uniform code - the UEB - in collaboration with major English-speaking countries. UEB produced a code which unified  across the English-speaking world, as well as for literary and technical subjects. At the same time, new Braille symbols were created to keep Braille up-to-date with print usage.The UEB brings together three of the previously-existing official Braille codes: English Braille, American Edition (literary material), Nemeth Code (mathematics and scientific notation), and Computer Braille Code (computer notation).

Australia was one of the first UEB adopters, in 2005, while it took a decade or so for other countries to adopt it across the board - in 2015, RNIB (along with other major Braille producers) transferred all Braille production in the UK to UEB.

What Does (and Doesn’t) UEB Change?

UEB retains the general-purpose literary code as its base, while allowing the addition of new symbols, providing flexibility for changes as print changes, reducing the complexity of certain rules, and allowing greater accuracy in back translation.

The major changes the UEB made include:

• Spacing: Words that were written together such as "and the" were mandated to have a space between them as they do in print.
• Elimination of some contractions: Owing to translation difficulties and confusion with other symbols, "ally," "ation," "ble," "by," "com," "dd,” "into," "o'clock," and "to" were removed from UEB.
• Punctuation: A few punctuation marks, such as parentheses, were changed, while symbols for brackets, quotation marks, dashes, and others were added.
• Indicators: Bold, underline, and italics each had their own indicators in UEB.
• Math symbols: Operational symbols such as plus and equals were incorporated.

The code for letters and numbers are the same as they are in the literary code.

Why UEB?

The UEB is designed to deal with a wide range of subject matter at all levels of complexity - while not drastically changing what makes the original six-dot Braille script easy to understand. It’s systematically constructed so that as new symbols are introduced into the code, they don’t conflict with those already in the code. It’s also well-suited to technical use, so it’s amenable to computer translation either from Braille to print or from print to Braille without the inaccuracies of previous Braille systems. This is especially important because online texts see many more instances of capital letters and lowercase and numbers all mixed together. UEB makes it much easier to represent a web address, a password, or a pin number in Braille.

UEB also has major advantages in the production of Braille texts and transcriptions. More consistency, less ambiguity, and fewer exceptions to Braille rules makes texts easier to produce and makes learning Braille easier. It reduces the effort required to produce both handwritten Braille texts and transcriptions of computer-produced Braille, and allows transcribers to put more focus on the advanced aspects of Braille production rather than spending time on basic elements.

Onward with UEB

UEB is a standard code, but it’s also a system that has room to expand, so that future symbols can be easily represented in the code. Its widespread and easy adoption also makes it a boon to learners of Braille. It’s why Annie, our innovation in Braille self-learning, uses the code in the learning materials for reading, writing, and typing. With UEB’s adoption in English-speaking countries worldwide, the Braille code is achieving a consistency and coherence that makes it ideal for the needs of the visually impaired community.

Braille is rightly celebrated as a vital means of expression for people with visual impairments. The tactile script has helped millions of people read and write since its development in the 19th century. In recent years though, both visually impaired and sighted people have used Braille in creative ways such that Braille has taken on new dimensions of expression. One of the most prominent ways this has happened is through art.

A Different Way of Seeing Art

It’s pretty common to see signs exclaiming “don’t touch the exhibits” in art galleries and museums. While this might sometimes be an important instruction to preserve the exhibit, it also deprives those who cannot see the art of the pleasure of its experience - or at least limits it to a secondary experience of reading a description of it. There is a dearth of visual art that considers the perspective of those with visual impairments, and how perspectives can be a part of art itself.

Fortunately however, some artists are now turning to Braille as a medium of representing the perspectives and experiences of the visually impaired community. While the tactile form of the script encourages people with visual impairments to indulge in touch - and hence subverts typical forms of ‘visual’ art - it can also offer creative ways to visualize the script for sighted viewers.

The well-known sighted visual artist and painter, Roy Nachum, set up an exhibition called "BLIND" which combines painting with Braille signage. The paintings illustrate surrealistic images of a fantasy realm, and poems inspired by the paintings are incorporated into the painting in Braille, in an attempt to “test our reliance on what we see and force different viewers to re-orient their perception of a work by also employing their sense of touch.” Vijaya Chauhan makes sculptures with Braille imprints on various mediums like terracotta, ceramic, wood, metal and stone intended to “create a dialogue with the spectator,” inspired by conversations with her visually impaired roommates several years ago.

There have also been projects to bring Braille art to public spaces, such as through graffiti. The Braille Art project in Russia, one of the first street art festivals for the visually impaired community, included objects consisting of visual symbols and text written in Braille that talked about the achievements of visually impaired people - such as Mikhail Pozhidaev, a scientist from Tomsk who, having lost his eyesight, invented an operating system for the blind and Ray Charles, who has 17 Grammys - who have become successful in different areas of life. The project also encouraged visitors - visually impaired and sighted - to create their own Braille art with stickers that had letters written in the Braille alphabet, along with their Cyrillic analogues. In India, students at Jadavpur University, Kolkata created ‘The Graffiti Joint’, a Braille graffiti project that reads ‘subaltern.’ Ishan Chakraborty,the co-ordinator of the project and a person with visual disability, notes that “[g]raffiti, as an art form…[aims] to start a dialogue about various issues” and that “Braille graffiti...is particularly effective as it enables and encourages interaction between the blind and the visually abled.”

At the same time, there have been efforts to make existing art festivals accessible to people with visual impairments. Siddhant Shah, heritage architect and disability access consultant, gave tactile form to photographs at the Serendipity Art Fair in Goa, which gave visually impaired visitors a direct connection to the images, from fishing nets to boats, that would’ve been difficult to grasp otherwise. He’s expanded this approach to other spaces too, including the Anubhav Tactile Gallery in Delhi, or the City Palace of Jaipur, as well as the National Museum in Kuala Lumpur. The 2019 Kochi-Muziris Biennale (KMB) presented 25 open Braille books created to the benefit of its visually impaired visitors, complementing the biennale’s central theme of inclusion.

Evolving Art, Evolving Braille

Artists have found creative new ways for Braille to be used in their daily lives too. The Braille Music Markup Language (or BMML) for example, reorganises written music into a highly structured, easily searchable database, which visually impairede musicians can read with the Braille Music Reader (BMR). The BMR lets a visually impaired musician play sheet music out loud, and add notations such as fingerings to the score, just as sighted musicians do. The designer Kosuke Takahashi blended both visible and tactile characters in the same space to create a hybrid script called “Braille Neue” that anyone can read. The layout already employed in the Braille alphabet acts as a framework for the overlapping visual text, while also helping educate those who can see it about Braille equivalents.

Making Braille Art

The power - and beauty - of art lies in its ability to express a diversity of thought and feeling in inventive ways, taking advantage of what we come across in our daily lives to encourage new perspectives. It’s also an incredible outlet for any of our imaginations. Turning Braille into an artistic medium, then, brings the script into our everyday lives, rather than treating it as a mysterious medium that only a few people use. Just as sighted people can pick up a pencil or pen and doodle or sketch on paper, those with visual impairments can even draw using a Braille writer or a slate and stylus! For children, it’s also a fun way of learning Braille, as well as developing concepts of space, form, of looking with both hands, of getting used to maps, charts,and all the drawings that are so necessary to a well-rounded education.

At Thinkerbell Labs, we recognize the potential for Braille to be a playful medium, and have created our learning materials and tools on Annie to engage young learners in creative ways. Braille can be a mutual medium of expression between sighted and visually impaired artists and audiences, a creative tool, and a source of pleasure. All it takes is a little imagination.

Writers and poets have often waxed eloquent about the beauty of the written word, and the pleasures of reading by themselves. Literacy has been a cultural and social touchstone for hundreds of years as the means to a private, individual life for the sighted. Why should it be any different for people with visual impairments? It was in recognizing this that Louis Braille set about creating the script that today is one of the strongest connective sinews for the visually impaired community, in their self-expression, autonomy and making of community.

Visual Impairment and Autonomy

Visual impairments contribute, unfortunately, to a person’s loss of autonomy in many spheres of their lives, with social structures and environments largely designed and built for the sighted. Just take a second to think about all the reading, writing, and typing that those of us with sight do on a daily basis - and think about how the vast majority of that activity relies on us being able to see text.

It’s these aspects of our sighted societies and cultures that impair a person without their full sight, leading to an inability to engage in daily activities such as studying, working, or household chores. This could be an impediment to their ability to be productive and happy, with a mixed range of emotional responses that accompany such instances. It falls to the community around them, then, to enable the person with visual impairments to let these emotions evolve and have the opportunity to process them, thus allowing the individual to find hope and the desire to shape their life. The path to autonomy is laid by empowering the person with the disability to forge that path.

This path is the first step to creating a sense of community with other visually impaired persons, one that empowers them to have a collective voice and presence in society at large. This presence indicates what the needs of the community are, and how they aim to communicate and achieve them.

To many such people, as they learn to find themselves in the world, access to the knowledge they seek and information they need is accessed through various texts. It’s evident that a key way for people with visual impairments to read and write these texts, to communicate with and organize their community, is through Braille.

The Many Meanings of Braille

Braille’s invention sparked a major recognition of the needs and desires of the blind and visually-impaired community, giving people better access to education, culture and information and offering a greater degree of autonomy. Schools and advocacy organisations for the visually impaired community grew to be more widespread, especially promoting Braille and Braille literacy as essential tools for the autonomy of blind and partially sighted individuals, emphasising its importance in education.

Braille literacy and advocacy reached its heights in the mid-20th century, with civil advocacy and philanthropic efforts working in tandem with legislation that recognized the script as a vital part of the lives of those with visual impairments. However, in recent years, there has been some debate on the script’s usefulness in a world at large that’s increasingly come to rely on technological solutions. Even as there are warnings about the myriad problems an over-reliance on (particularly inaccessible) technology can cause, some say that assistive technology like screen readers can supersede the need for a script like Braille.

What this 'technological solutionism' - an idea that technology alone can solve what are essentially human and social issues - overlooks is what Braille in particular offers its users, not just as a script, but as a marker of the visually impaired community. It is one of the most visible signs of the social identity that members of the community claim through Braille, presenting a unique medium for members of the visually impaired community to express their ideas and selves. With its presence in public spaces, and even on everyday goods - such as pharmaceutical goods, as mandated by several countries - Braille reminds the sighted that the visually impaired community is an active part of society at large.

Relying on technology for everyday reading and writing also assumes that it is both easier and more desirable to listen to text read aloud, or to orally record what someone wants to have written. With the mixed results that such tech have - especially for young learners - this is not an assumption we should be rushing to make, particularly when these technological avenues are not uniformly accessible to everyone. Illiteracy cannot be solved by speech-based technology alone, and can just as easily contribute to increased social inequalities. Such practise puts people in a vulnerable and technology-dependent position. Braille, on the other hand, is notably ‘low tech’, and can be produced with simpler tools.

Braille’s greatest strength, however, remains its unique suitability to reading and writing for those without their full sight. The genius of the Braille script lies in its six-dot form, that can be recognized at much higher speeds and with greater accuracy by a visually impaired reader than a whole letter. It also enables its readers to have a strong understanding of the smallest units of language, how it’s structured and how interactions between words function in a sentence, in addition to their role in the development of content in a text. And perhaps most importantly, it allows the community to create physical records of their thoughts, allowing them to be picked up again, re-evaluate and build upon them, creating a corpus of written knowledge.

What Braille Continues to Mean

Braille has kept pace with the technological and communication developments of the 21st century. There are now a range of methods for producing Braille both on paper (such as cheaper Braille printers and embossers) and in digital formats like the BRF with notetakers. But a lot of work remains to be done to draw attention to the many possibilities that lie with Braille, aided, but not superseded, by technological development. A significant part of this growth will come through tools like Thinkerbell Labs’ own Annie, that support Braille literacy initiatives while addressing the friction of traditional means of Braille education.

Literacy in Braille remains an important and evident marker of persons with visual impairments' participation in society. It's a sign of social recognition of their expression. And that expressiveness is key to their voices being heard. The future for Braille is still bright - it’s important that we understand why.

With the development of Braille, literacy acquired an evolved meaning across cultures and contexts. Beginning with its early period of acceptance to now becoming a widespread yet unique mode of reading, writing and typing among blind and visually impaired people, the script has had a significant impact on the social inclusion of the communities too.

Education in and about Braille has been inherently tied to the script’s growing use from the start. Tracing this history is also tracing the history of the visually impaired community, their challenges in obtaining their rights and the broader sociopolitical moments that marked this journey.

The Early Years of Braille Education

The Braille script’s invention in the 1820s set off a slow and steady growth in its acceptance, led by Louis Braille’s pursuits as an educator himself. While Braille’s home country of France adopted the script as its official system of written communication for blind persons only in 1854 - a year after his death -  the Missouri School for the Blind became the first institute in the United States to use Braille in 1860 , while the first day school for the blind was established in England in 1898. In these later decades of the 19th century, educational institutions were slow to adopt the script, even as technical improvements for Braille, such as the Braillewriter - the first mechanical device for writing Braille - and the Braille shorthand system, were developed.

It was in the early to mid-20th century that Braille’s usefulness came to be widely recognized, and educational avenues for the script flourished. Britain had adopted the uniform Braille code in 1905, and in the United States, by 1900 public schools were improving and teacher training had adequately progressed so that integration of blind children into these schools had begun. Many special and local schools were able to provide Braille classes supported by government and philanthropic funds for special equipment and programs. In 1902, a library and reading room for people who were blind opened in San Francisco. Inclusive schools played an important role of integration with sighted pupils, helping those children appreciate the abilities of blind and visually impaired children so that they would have better attitudes towards them in adult life and work.

Public efforts - both by the visually impaired and sighted communities - continued to support education. Helen Keller, who became the first deaf-blind person to earn a college degree Radcliffe College in 1904, was an avid proponent of Braille, and wrote about her experiences - including her difficulties and victories in obtaining an education - in her 1903 memoir, The Story of My Life. Schools across the United States began organizing Braille reading classes, with Standard English Braille being adopted as uniform type by the American and British Uniform Type Committees in 1932. India adopted the Uniform Braille codes for various languages in 1951, with the government setting up its first school that taught Braille - still operational - called the Model School for Blind Children in 1959 at Dehradun.

The 1960s witnessed widespread efforts to improve educational conditions for the visually impaired, including efforts to train more teachers in standardised modes of inclusive education, including the teaching of communication skills and orientation, mobility, and daily living skills. At least in the US, the retrolental fibroplasia (RLF) epidemic caused blindness in many children from birth, a large number of whom belonged to middle- and upper-class families. These families pressurized their local governments to open more schools in their vicinities, hiring more teachers and adopting new approaches, such as modifying existing general curricula for sighted students to educate visually impaired students and sighted teachers and students receiving help from specialized teachers who were trained to instruct students with visual impairments.

It also began to be recognized that many early efforts at inclusion would probably have failed were the classroom teacher, the parents, and other instructors of students with visual impairments not equally important partners on an educational team. Along with systemic and technical improvements in the means and form of education, such attitudinal changes in society at large also helped bring about the implementation of a range of legislative and policy instruments.

Political Influences on the Education of Visually Impaired Persons

The latter half of the 20th century saw many of the social shifts around the education of visually impaired children that occurred in the first half of the 20th century being solidified through legislation - this often included the establishment of Braille day-school classes. This move was concentrated in the 1970s with the passage of laws such as the Integrated Education for Disabled Children (IEDC) scheme in 1974 to be implemented through government schools in India, and the Education for All Handicapped Children Act in 1975 in the US - later renamed and strengthened as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).

Braille Education Today

Perhaps the most important changes that came about in education for the visually impaired along with the societal changes were the rapid technological changes - beginning, perhaps, with computers being adapted to produce Braille outputs in 1963. This increased the accessibility of educational materials in Braille for an increasing number of students. It also opened up new avenues of education and community for the visually impaired community.

The dynamism of technological means of education has also allowed for people across the spectrum of visual impairment to access tools and resources such as refreshable Braille displays and magnification devices tailored to their specific needs. These can range from adaptive tools and materials in tactile or enlarged form for blind children in standard classrooms to a completely individualized curriculum which may focus on developmental goals alongside academic ones. Still, students who use Braille are generally better equipped to keep pace in a regular classroom than their peers who do not. This is because Braille remains an effective reading medium; it allows access to virtually all print materials and enables students to read quickly and without fatigue.

This is a key reason that we at Thinkerbell Labs have blended the strengths of technological devices and software tools to provide visually impaired students with a comprehensive Braille learning experience on Annie. Adopting learning materials from Braille pioneers such as the RNIB, such technology-enabled learning is on the leading edge of Braille education.

Today, even though some challenges remain in extending Braille education to all those children who would benefit from it, we’ve come a long way. Learning materials are more accessible, there’s more schools tailored to the needs of the community, and governmental and philanthropic efforts continue to provide the impetus to better the learning and social conditions of the visually impaired. While there’s much work to be done and more history to be made, it’s been a long and rewarding road for Braille and education for the visually impaired.

Education for people with disabilities has had a fraught history, with attitudes and methods taking centuries to become systemic, to become truly valuable to the communities who need it the most. Resources and technologies were slow to come due to the societal stigma around disability. This was no different for visual impairments in particular.

This long period of development, however, has yielded a slow but rich history of education for people with visual impairments. And we can trace this history back even further than Braille.

Early Global Attitudes Towards Visual Impairment

Early attitudes towards visually impaired people across the world can be broadly divided into three ages of

(1) indifference or segregation

(2) pity and humanitarianism; and

(3) self-reliance and social integration

In ancient India, for example, while the mythology and history generally advocated for the rulers and families to take care of people with disabilities, they were often described as weak or as atoning for past sins. European attitudes were more negligent in earlier centuries, often ostracizing people with disabilities from communities. Even as the sighted population’s access to information moved away from the oral with the introduction of the printing press in Europe during the 15th century, the blind became more and more isolated from intellectual advancement by having to rely on the sighted for their information.

Literacy, reading and writing was hampered. This gap in a means of literacy for the visually impaired was caused in part by technological problems but also by a lack of understanding of the needs and capabilities of those lacking the sense of sight. John Milton, the famous poet, had to write by using his sighted daughters’ help after losing his sight.

It was as conceptions of ‘charity’ became widespread in Western society that there was a shift in societal attitudes towards - but limited to - assisting people with disabilities. A major source of this philosophical groundwork for educating persons with visual impairments was laid by Denis Diderot, a philosopher who published Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who See in 1749, much of which was based on his contacts with Nicholas Saunderson, a mathematics professor at Cambridge; and Maria Theresia von Paradis, a Viennese pianist and music teacher, both of whom were visually impaired. The competence of Saunderson and von Paradis convinced Diderot that people who were blind could be intellectually capable and could lead regular lives.

This paradigmatic shift towards the autonomy of visually impaired persons accelerated efforts for their social inclusion. A key part of this was evidently to be their education.

Early Modern Education for the Visually Impaired

Even as societal attitudes to the education of the blind and visually impaired were changing for the better, early attempts to educate them were usually made by tutors to the children of the wealthy. Furthermore, prior to the 18th century, none of the scattered attempts to educate children with visual impairments resulted in the development of systematic programs.

Furthermore, the earliest teachers of the blind were self-trained in their methods and were often unaware of the work and successes of others. Any progress languished. Only in the late 18th century did formal training commence.

The first notable charitable educational institute for the blind was the L'Institution Nationale des Jeunes Aveugles (The National Institution For The Young Blind), opened in Paris in 1784 by Valentin Haüy, where he experimented with various sizes and forms of raised Roman letters to teach students who were blind to read. With demonstrations of the pupils’ talents in art and music, Haüy hoped to elicit admiration for the students’ competence, not pity for their blindness.

While the first school for the blind in England opened in Liverpool in 1791, it took a while longer for the United States, with the New England Asylum for the Blind being incorporated in Watertown, Massachusetts in 1829. It was this institution that would go on to become the venerable Perkins School for the Blind, with Samuel Gridley Howe - who traveled through Europe to learn how the blind were being educated there - as its first superintendent. Howe's credo was that blind children shouldn't suffer from lack of self-esteem, which convinced him of the importance of fostering independence and self-reliance among his pupils.

Valentin Hauy and the Perkins School trained teachers on an apprenticeship basis. Commonly, teachers were themselves blind graduates of the institutions at which they taught. This was largely based on the notion that only the visually impaired person can really say what they can, or cannot, see. Since every student is an individual with individual needs, it was believed that only members of the community could adopt pedagogies and teaching strategies which suited visually impaired students.

Throughout the 19th century, residential schools were usually the sole option for the education of children with visual impairments. One reason was that public schools were seen as incapable of meeting the requirements of visually impaired children: their staff lacked training special education and the schools themselves were unsafe environments for children with limited mobility. Another was geographic necessity, owing often to the low population density of blind children - these schools were set up in large cities with populations of children with visual impairments that were sizable enough to justify the provision of specialized services.

Such schools were being established in the same periods in India too. The Bengal Military Orphan Asylum, Calcutta, having blind orphans in its school, adopted the Lucas reading system by 1840, although this system was overtaken by Moon's embossed type for blind readers in several Indian languages during the 1850s. These children seem to have been the first in South Asian history to be educated in a school with a formal system designed for their needs, with supplies largely provided by colonial authorities. The first special school for the blind in India was set up at Amritsar in 1887 - the Sharp Memorial School for the Blind, named after its founder, Annie Sharp. In subsequent decades, several special schools came up in different parts of the country, such as the Calcutta School for the Blind founded by Lal Bihari Shah in 1897, the American Marathi Mission School for the Blind in Mumbai in the year 1900, which came to be known as "The Dadar School for the Blind." Here, blind children received education along with some elementary trades that later led them to some kind of vocational rehabilitation.

However, as public schools themselves improved and teacher training included provisions for special education, pioneers such as Howe advocated the right of all visually impaired children to a free public education, as opposed to institutions away from society-at-large’s sight, which was often seen as society meeting its obligations but also potentially as a way to forget the disabled. In India, not much was seen to be achieved in the socioeconomic conditions of the blind through the residential system of education. There were other concerns too – isolation from mainstream, the standard of education and expensive nature of the system. Educational leaders also empathized with the need for young children to remain at home with parents and siblings, and to associate with sighted children in inclusive settings.

Alongside these attitudinal and educational shifts, there would come to occur a landmark moment in the education of the blind and visually impaired, courtesy the most famous pupil of Valentin Haüy's school - Louis Braille.

In part 2, we'll look at the evolution of education for visually impaired children due to the acceptance and influence  of Braille, including its use in technological resources like Annie.

In a line - Braille matters today for the same reasons any other language script does. It’s a vital and vibrant means of communication, education, and making community for people with visual impairments. Still, some argue that Braille is falling to the wayside as assistive technology such as screen-readers help people ‘read’ standard scripts. However, there are still several elements of Braille that have made it valuable for millions of people for nearly two centuries - it’s important to understand why this is, and how these strengths of the script are still relevant today.

The Original Strengths of Braille

Braille is essential, and essentially personal. With its worldwide presence and recognition, Braille has been, for many decades, the primary means for visually impaired persons to read and write - and even type. Researchers such as Dr. Ruby Ryles, a blindness researcher at Louisiana Tech University, have noted a strong correlation between the ability to read Braille and a higher educational level, a higher likelihood of employment, and a higher income, especially when learnt at a young age.

With the recognition of Braille’s importance and changes in Braille production mechanisms, Braille text has become cheaper to make in recent years, making its proliferation more widespread. It’s grown to be useful at work as a fast and efficient way to make notes in meetings and to review long printed documents. It’s not rare to find public signs with Braille texts to help blind people navigate.

Within the home, being able to label clothing, food packaging, and domestic appliances around the home with Braille helps blind or visually impaired people live independently. Items such as washing machines can be made accessible to a blind person such as by having raised or clear print markings on the controls to indicate the different settings or uses of each knob or dial.

Perhaps the most important aspect of Braille, however, has been the personal and private autonomy that the script allows its users in expressing themselves, their needs and wants. It’s not simply a means of writing and reading - Braille is to many visually impaired and blind people, an inseparable component of their life and identity. Dr. Fredric Schroeder found in his work with visually impaired persons that Braille literacy “seems to represent competence, independence, and equality, so the mastery and use of Braille played a central role in the development of their self-identities as persons who are capable, competent, independent, and equal.”

Braille usage is also an indication to the visually impaired community that sighted society cares about their rights and needs. Presenting information and working on the widespread use of Braille helps the community feel that her values as a human are respected.

Braille is personal like all language is. Having information in Braille ensures more protection for private lives. It’s personal when reading an email on a refreshable Braille display. It’s personal when one grabs the right credit card because it’s labeled, or when fishing around in the refrigerator reading labels.It’s personal when a letter arrives typed in Braille. It is personal in the simple act of reading a book. Even for children, reading on their own is a special pleasure that shouldn’t be denied to them. Literacy helps stimulate children’s learning abilities, their imaginations and creative skills, and helps them communicate in the language they’d use in their everyday lives. Braille also helps people with visual impairments ‘read’ things that we might not immediately think of as texts, such as music codes and notations, and Nemeth for scientists and mathematicians.

Communication in the Technological Age

With the rapid development and spread of new communication technologies, the way we use language has changed quite a bit. The speed of communication has gone up, and it’s generally much easier to use these tools. Communication has, in many ways, ‘gone paperless’ as information in the form of text and images are displayed on our phones and computer screens. And with tools like autocorrect and predictive text, spelling and grammar can be managed by the devices we use.

But sighted people still learn the alphabet, grammar, writing and other standard tools of language in school. It turns out that no matter the changes that technology brings, the fundamentals of learning and using language don’t change. While it might be possible to use language scripts digitally, their analogue roots are still vital knowledge.

Communicating with Braille Today

Braille is no different - it’s personal, no matter the technology used to access it. Some blind people say that advances in assistive technology, such as audio books, voice-recognition software, and computer screen-readers, have rendered Braille redundant, and point to the cumbersome nature of many Braille books. But the unique strengths of literacy have yet to be replicated by such technology.

Braille offers its readers and writers the direct connection to language with “seeing” words with one’s fingers. The autonomy that Braille offers means a visually impaired person doesn’t need to rely on technology for their everyday routines to go smoothly. Tech breaks down - it’s expensive and slow to repair. It is critical to think about the position we place individuals in when they don’t have access to Braille skills in this place. Technologies like television and the internet haven’t made language script for the sighted obsolete, or replaced the need for a sighted child to learn to read; why should Braille be any different?

Technology can potentially supplement Braille - after all, it multiplies the modes of interaction with the world, and hence enables visually impaired people to parallel sighted people in communicating with each other. Advances in technology have made Braille more widely available and accessible than it might’ve been in the past.

Software tools, Braille displays, and embossers can, for example, translate any document into Braille quickly and accurately. Thousands of Braille books are available from Internet-based services. BrailleType, a single-touch text-entry system for touch screen devices allows the blind user to enter text as if they were writing Braille using the traditional 6-dot matrix code. The Android OS has a built-in Braille keyboard. Braille can continue to move off the page, to electronic displays, portable devices that can hold many more pages of script than a book, and can support touch with haptics and audio.

Besides digital technologies, there are also several hardware-based ‘low tech’ options for the use of Braille. Older methods of writing and embossing in Braille have gotten cheaper and easier to duplicate. 3D printing reduces costs of production of Braille texts. Non-digital devices like the Perkins Brailler and refreshable Braille displays that bring Braille writing and reading to many more people have been important innovations. Several devices now offer multi-line Braille reading. With the lowering costs of these innovations in Braille, the script will grow to be even more accessible to many more users.

Learning (with) Braille Today

The personal nature of Braille is a double-edged sword when it comes to learning Braille. The close attention students need in order to ensure accuracy and fluency in Braille is often difficult for a small number of trained teachers to provide. There is a shortage of teachers who are qualified to teach Braille. There is a lack of tools that make learning Braille as accessible as learning print. School architectures and other aspects of learning environments aren’t often visual-impairment-friendly.

The pedagogies involved in teaching Braille have so far tended to involve human-based face to face interaction in classroom settings. But today, technology enables teachers to adapt new pedagogies that take this base and build on it. This is true for learning for both the visually impaired and the sighted - but in specifically differing ways. While sighted students have already had access to an array of such educational technologies, the existing systems of Braille learning are open for modernizing and upgrading in inventive ways.

There are a number of learning aids, tools and technologies quickly gaining popularity in the learning of Braille. They can be something as simple as LEGO’s Braille Bricks which form a letter, number, or math symbol in Braille printed with tactile symbols that aims to help children with visual impairments learn how to read Braille. Technology has the ability to empower the individual learner, making it possible for visually impaired children to take advantage of self-learning, multimodal, interactive and gamified learning materials.

This is tantamount to a paradigm shift in Braille learning: educational technologies can both enable self-learning as well as reap the benefits of a classroom setting. The relative portability of such tech means more materials can be used in the classroom with fewer equipment, reducing reliance on difficult-to-handle quantities of Braille texts by bringing all forms of Braille learning, i.e., reading, writing, and typing onto a single platform. It’s a multidimensional form of learning that helps overcome the pitfalls of the existing modes of teaching and learning.

The full potential of these initiatives, however, can only be realized in tandem with teachers. The role of the teacher can change - they no longer need to micromanage the learner, but help guide them on their learning journey. With multimodal technologies that combine audibility with tactility, these interactive paths of learning dynamically enable the learner to direct their own learning. These teachers themselves don't need to be retrained in the new tech - they’re intuitive enough to allow them to focus on developing effective pedagogies and overall classroom management.

Students can increasingly access digital and online learning materials with the use of assistive technologies, but it is essential to choose resources that are accessible. For example, when lessons involve graphics, they can be Braille-based or tactile; class texts must be available in Braille, etc. Audibility might not be possible in every scenario but combined with Braille’s tactility, it can create multimodal interactive mechanisms and tools that, with new technologies, can be made dynamic for the situation at hand. New tech also allows such decisions to be made by the Braille user. Technology has the potential to leverage Braille to empower the visually impaired individual to access the education that is widely available to the sighted learner.

These efforts towards equity of access are especially important in inclusive classrooms where Braille texts can be incorporated into classroom instruction using a combination of electronic and hard copies. At all levels of schooling, such materials will enable visually impaired learners to engage with the class along with their sighted peers (without excessive extra apparatus that may seem to set them apart).

It helps students to have hard copies in cases where they may need to read quickly, as they’re comfortable in the tactility of Braille. The ability to see headings and subheadings in hard-copy Braille also contributes to one’s ability to learn materials. For notetaking, on the other hand, refreshable Braille displays and digital Braille tech like BrailleNote go a long way.

This kind of blend of Braille fundamentals with technology has been tried and tested with Thinkerbell Labs’ flagship innovation in Braille self-learning, Annie. By offering lessons in reading, writing, and typing in vernacular and English language Braille through standard tools like the Brailler and slate on a single device, Annie familiarizes young learners with the ways tech enables Braille use. The classroom environments we’ve designed to balance the learner-teacher relationship, the Annie Smart Class, have gone a long way in fostering an exciting and effective learning environment. Teachers can track student learning and performance and alter their pedagogies, refocus on certain aspects of study or certain students as necessary. Technologically, an Annie isn't resource-intensive yet it makes good use of what tech can do.

Braille and its Futures

Braille isn’t limited to text on the page or screen either. There’s a growing number of technological options that creatively use the tactile form of Braille to communicate an array of information. For example, there’s the haptic chair that could communicate to a blind person when the person opposite them is smiling, or frowning, and could instantly translate non-Braille text into haptic sensations that replicate Braille bumps. Blind Maps is a navigation device that syncs to a user’s iPhone, providing tangible feedback on the route through a Braille-like interface.

From the smart classroom (with technology integrated into the classroom and allowing the learner to participate on their own terms) to the smart city (Braille street signs through digital interfaces and Braille smart cards for public transportation), Braille is a touchstone for the visually impaired community’s interactions with their world, on their terms.

The Continuing Role of Braille Today (with Tech!)

It’s evident that technology has quickly found its place alongside much of a visually impaired person’s life, from their education to everyday communication. It’s also obvious that to succeed in school, work and life, blind people need the opportunities that literacy provides. In many developing countries including India, where Braille assistive tech is not yet commonplace, affordable or even available, Braille is the primary means to literacy for visually impaired persons.

Braille can also help augment employable skills with tech, using it where available to inculcate modern economic and productive skills. For example, they may learn state of the art digital and design skills which may even help some find employment as well as generating income from sales of products. People with visual impairments may themselves be involved in Braille production through tech like 3D printing, which can provide a viable means of employment. Employment for people with visual impairments can help individuals and communities be self-reliant.

To promote Braille literacy is a way to enhance every aspect of the lives of the visually impaired. From educational technologies like Annie to communication technologies like digital Braille, our technological age is not just for the sighted.

Technology is constantly changing how we live our lives. For several years now, these changes have come  in several ways to education too. But the question that remains is how teachers can make the most of tech to find new and exciting ways to excite and challenge their students, while nurturing the core strengths of a classroom. It’s a balance that aims to familiarize students with the technology that they might go on to use, grounded in the fundamentals of a comprehensive education.

Education for visually impaired children shouldn’t - and needn’t - be any different. These children’s teachers are passionate and committed individuals, sensitive to their needs and keen to help them shape fulfilling lives. Braille in particular though, takes a great deal of patience and individual attention to ensure students are well-versed in the script. This is where educational technology, or EdTech, can play a vital role in rethinking the role of the teacher and how their pedagogies can cater to their students.

EdTech as the Student’s Companion

There’s something unique about the human touch - after all, it’s what helps people read Braille! But this doesn’t mean that educational technology displaces teachers - in fact, the idea is to complement what teachers do in the classroom. EdTech innovations can take up the mechanical work that’s involved in guiding students to read, write, and type, as well as provide feedback on the accuracy of responses - they complement the teacher.

Annie,Thinkerbell Labs’ innovation in Braille self-learning, aims to be a student’s guide, companion, and friend. The device has everything a student needs to learn the basics of reading, writing, and typing in Braille in English and several other Indian languages. At the same time, this means that the teacher doesn’t need to handhold each student individually through the minute aspects of Braille - all the teaching modules are built into Annie in an easy-to-use form. With the dearth of qualified teachers for visually impaired children, this can significantly reduce the burden on the teachers who are in schools.

Learning in the Annie Smart Class, the classroom environment in which we set up Annies for several students, encourages children to direct their own learning, pacing and selecting the lessons they want to learn. This allows teachers to focus on broad questions that students might come up with in the course of their learning, and also attend to many more students than they could in a regular classroom. As several teachers who we’ve worked with have noted, teaching Braille has never been easier.

With the right EdTech tools then, teachers can preserve the classroom environment, while also looking at ways to enhance it. EdTech can help teachers explore creative ways of learning with their students, work with them on critical thinking and reasoning, rather than spend extended periods of time trying to teach them the basics of Braille. That is the strength of a technological innovation like Annie.

Bettering Student Performance

While EdTech can help teachers step back from micromanaging students, it can also help them tunnel into each student’s learning process without having to interrupt them in class. The digital platforms that often come with EdTech tools can be designed to accurately understand how students are learning - what they’re doing well in, where they need help, and if necessary, teachers can intervene.

It’s especially hard to frequently verify each student’s answers in Braille. The texts that students write in can get cumbersome to handle, and it’s hard to directly provide any feedback or corrections on the text itself. With intuitive and comprehensive feedback that directly addresses students’ gaps in understanding and errors, these difficulties are easily overcome by EdTech tools. The ideal, then, is to shift from managing each student’s work to managing the classroom as a whole. The role of the teacher becomes that of a thoughtful guide, rather than an inflexible instructor and supervisor.

With Helios, the performance management suite that works in the Annie ecosystem, the teacher can take on this evolved role with a breadth and clarity that simple classroom supervision cannot offer. Helios allows the teacher to check each student’s performance from a single view, updated frequently as students learn with their Annies. Each student’s profile offers a look at the learner’s progress with Annie’s materials at a granular level, word by word, lesson by lesson. It also allows teachers to check how accurately and quickly their learners are able to read, write, and type in Braille.

With this powerful overview, everything teachers need to understand their classrooms available with a quick look at the Helios interface. By seeing how far along in their journey towards Braille literacy their students are, teachers have the ability to plan lessons according to their students’ capabilities and learning needs. With the information they have on how their students learn, teachers can now approach their classes with a freedom of thought that was difficult to come by before, with all the minute work they once had to do.

Rethinking Pedagogies for Braille

Teachers are preparing students for a world that’s rapidly changing. They’re having to come up with innovative ways to not only teach the fundamentals, but equip children with the skills of self-sufficiency, interpersonal interaction, and critical thinking that are so vital to participating in society. This is tough. But what if teachers can focus on helping students acquire these skills, rather than spend all their time and energy on rote learning? This can open up the classroom to creative teaching strategies, and pedagogies that involve children in their own learning.

Teachers of visually impaired children also seek to inculcate an atmosphere of social inclusion and careful attention in their classrooms. In inclusive schools, for example, teachers need to pay attention to providing varied ways for students with disabilities to participate in the class, such as accessible texts and inclusive group learning. EdTech’s role here would then be to support teachers in helping learners focus on connecting with their everyday world.

The role of a device like Annie, then, would be twofold - one, to help children learn Braille on their own with the help, where necessary, of a teacher, and two, to create the space for pedagogies and conversations about how technology can be incorporated into schooling. Tech-enabled learning can provide an easy-to-use and fun platform for children to learn the basics, as our Annie Smart Classes do, while teachers focus on preparing students in more complex subjects and ideas in other classrooms. Using a device like Annie can also help teachers demonstrate how technology can help children with their work. They can also use it as a starting point in lessons on how to navigate our technological age in ways that bring them the most benefits.

The Symbiosis between Teachers and Technology

With Annie, we’ve helped students become self-reliant and excited learners. But we also recognize that the classroom is incomplete without the teacher. We want to empower teachers to get creative with their lessons. We also want them to require less effort in working with their students, while staying involved as people and achieving the outcomes they desire. We don’t think teaching Braille needs to be rudimentary - there are ways for educational technology to expand the horizons of what can be achieved in a classroom.

It’s this symbiosis - a partnership between teacher and tech - that we hope can help shape classrooms for the visually impaired today. It’s a long journey, but one we’re sure will be fulfilling for everyone - teacher and student.

India is a country of over a thousand languages and dialects. This incredible diversity of expression also means that there isn’t a standard script that can be used across these languages. For visually impaired people, however, the six-dot standard of Braille is a unique strength - easily adaptable to a number of languages, irrespective of the language’s original script. For India, this adaptability led to the development and widespread adoption of Bharati Braille, designed for many of the most widely-spoken and read languages in the country. Today, this script is a driver of inclusion for scores of visually impaired Indians.

The History of Braille in India

Braille’s beginnings in India can be traced back to colonial times, when British missionaries and bureaucrats introduced and adapted various iterations of Braille, including Oriental Braille, to Indian languages. The growing use of Braille in America and Europe was paralleled in India in the later half of the 19th century, as missionaries established various schools for the blind at Palayamkottai (1890), Calcutta(1897), Ranchi (1898), Mumbai (1900). However, the lack of a standard approach and script, and the colonial attitude towards educating Indians at the time, limited the spread of Braille literacy.

In 1943 in India, a government-appointed committee prepared a common Braille Code and circulated the same among various provincial Governments and institutions for the blind. When India gained independence in 1947, 11 Braille codes for different regional languages were in use in various parts of the country. The recommendations of this conference led to the development of “Bharati Braille'' for the official Indian languages - Hindi, Tamil, Marathi, Gujarati, Bengali, Kannada, Punjabi, Assamese, Malayalam, Nepali, Odia, Telugu, & Urdu - and its recommendation for nationwide use. The National Institute for the Empowerment of Persons with Visual Disabilities (NIEPVD), then known as the National Institute for the Visually Handicapped, was also deeply involved in the standardization of Bharati Braille. Their Braille Development Unit contributed notation systems for Maths, Music, and Science, as well as Braille contractions, abbreviations, and shorthand systems for most of the official languages of the country.

Braille is often a means for the blind and visually impaired community to foster social bonds and identities, and leverage this into a political voice. Bharati Braille is no different, reaching people irrespective of the language they speak. As Aparna Nair, a historian of medicine and disability, says, “[t]his uniform, universally taught” form of Braille had important effects, including a path to ‘uniting the blind of the whole world who are divided from their fellow sufferers by prejudices of caste, religious customs and manners’. Since the early years, Bharati Braille has earned its place as a vital channel of social inclusion for blind and visually impaired communities.

Bharati Braille: Learning and Communicating

The languages that we use in everyday life form an important part of how we communicate. So while English Braille remains popular in India, such as for books and employment opportunities, Bharati Braille offers a way for visually impaired people to read and write - and hence share their thoughts and ideas - in the vernacular languages they hear and talk in daily. Classics like Ramayana, Mahabharat, Ramcharitmanas and Tagore’s Gitanjali are also available in the script. Bharati Braille has since also been adopted in Nepal and Bangladesh with slight modifications.

It makes sense, then, to have educational opportunities in Bharati Braille too. The common form of English and Bharati Braille also makes it easier to teach multiple languages with a common understanding of the base Braille script and the ways to read, write, and type it. By beginning at primary schooling, Bharati Braille offers a closer linguistic connection to students’ immediate surroundings. Since Bharati Braille is based on phonetics rather than the alphabet, it is simpler to connect to sounded words too, opening up multimodal - touch and sound - ways of teaching the script.

Bharati Braille is increasingly the basis for expanding education to more visually impaired learners. The National Education Policy, 2020, makes recommendations in section 6 of the document for “Equitable and Inclusive Education: Learning for All”, focussed on ”foundational literacy and numeracy, access, enrolment and attendance” along with “suitable technological interventions to ensure access can be particularly effective for certain children with disabilities.” Alongside directions to make education accessible to children with disabilities through the right resources, it explicitly calls for “adequate and language-appropriate teaching-learning materials,” including textbooks in accessible formats such as Braille. The NIEPVD also continues to conduct research towards the propagation and popularization of Bharati Braille, including ways to incorporate the script into higher education.

Taking Bharati Braille Forward

The advantages of Bharati Braille are clear - and with its rich history, the script is steadily becoming widespread. Perhaps the greatest challenge that remains, then, is ensuring that the people who would most benefit from knowing this accessible and useful script can learn and use it. As the NEP makes clear, alongside the English Braille script, Bharati Braille too can find its place in the education of visually impaired children.

At Thinkerbell Labs, we’ve long been sure that educational technologies are key to making this happen. It’s why we’ve had lessons in several Indian languages - such as Hindi, Marathi, Kannada, Tamil and more - on Annie, our innovation in Braille self-learning. By taking advantage of the thought poured into developing the Bharati Braille script, we’ve brought lessons to hundreds of visually impaired children across India in the language they prefer.

Think back for a second to your childhood days at school. It’s not hard to guess that a number of those memories are about the lighter moments - the invented and reinvented games, the stories shared in lunch breaks, and the lighthearted competitions with friends. As children, we treasured playfulness. When such moments were a part of our classrooms, they're indelibly imprinted in our minds.

Learning Braille doesn’t have to be any different. While traditional means of teaching Braille have limited what students and teachers can do in the classroom, there are now a number of ways to make play a part of learning. With Thinkerbell Labs’ own Annie, for example, we make games, interactive lessons, stories and songs the heart of an education in Braille. Helping bring these joys to the classrooms of visually impaired children is a wonderful thing.

1. Making Sense of the World Through Play

An essential part of the learning process is using it to find meaning in students’ experiences of the world. This means being able to locate what they’re learning in their everyday lives - be it at school, home, or playing with their friends. Learning through play is meaningful.

Visually impaired children learn about the world around them in the way that it is described - this includes the way their friends play with them, describing the rules and form of their games in senses of touch, movement, and place (“throw the ball to me, I’m here!”). By bringing this world of play through learners’ senses into their classrooms, children are excited by the possibility of learning about what’s fun to them. With Braille, children also have the means to read and write about these parts of their lives that they hold dear.

On Annie, the learning materials - games, stories, and songs - refer to objects and places that children might encounter everyday. The ball that they catch, the trees they might climb, the open field outside their classroom, the wood of their benches. The shapes on Annie themselves are designed to make associations with their names through the instructions. Annie’s a companion for blind and visually impaired children - what better way to be one than to be a part of their lives’ stories?

2. Bringing Joy to Learning

Too often, when we think of school, we think of bored faces and monotonous afternoons. Bringing play into children’s places of learning can not just help dispel this monotony - it can make learning itself joyful, and by extension, something kids are happier to be an active part of. What if we can make learning Braille what makes children happy, by incorporating what brings them joy in their games into their lessons?

On Annie, we’ve developed several games that help children hone their skills in reading and typing in Braille, as well as better their spelling and vocabulary. But these games are designed to be, first and foremost, fun. Kids play to get quicker at hitting their marks on the Braille cells in Whack a Braille, or get a higher score as they learn to spell out words in Braille in Letter Race. The reward, to us, is more than student performance - it’s also the bright smile on their faces when they get a new high score on Annie.

3. Making Learning Engaging Through Interactivity and Games

Bored kids are also disengaged learners. Education cannot be a one-way street; to keep children interested and active in the classroom, it’s important to move from how lessons can be taught by a teacher, to how children can learn through games and interactive activities. Play can help challenge children's thinking about what they learn, making learning more engaging.

For children with visual impairments, whose sense of the world is a mix of touch and sound, holding their interest depends on applying both to their lessons. Games, and other forms of interactive play, bring these senses together in ways that draw children’s attention and concentration, so they’re fully engaged in the activity. This is evidently great for learning.

Annie’s games are built to challenge and focus children’s speed, accuracy, and knowledge of reading, writing, and typing the Braille script, along with their ability to associate this script with letters and words. Whether they’re playing Whack-a-Key and learning the order of Braille typing keys, or spelling the words that start with the letter they’ve chosen to learn, the focus is on keeping the learners engaged in interacting with Annie. With both the playful affirmations and feedback Annie gives the learner, they’re keen to know Braille better.

4. Practicing, Learning, and Growing

It’s said that practice makes perfect. But with learning through play, practice is the point, not perfection. Children play to practice skills, try out possibilities, revise what they’ve learnt and discover new challenges, leading to deeper learning. When this sort of iterative practice becomes play, children can better their own skills and learning through methods that become natural to them.

The tactile form of Braille, in particular, means that fluently reading, writing, and typing in Braille takes a fair amount of practice. Luckily, this same form - particularly, the dots - makes it easier to gamify learners’ interactions with the script through clickable keys, slates, and styluses. The more kids play these games then, the more the skills they need to read, write, and type in Braille improve.

This is the basis for the interactive lessons and games on Annie, which make it a point to connect each key a learner pressed, each word they read on the Braille cell, and each word they write on the Braille slate to a gamified element. Whether it be through a quick game at the end of a lesson, or a unique game like Braille Pop - that creatively challenges children to think about the connection between the Braille dots and the spelling of a word - Annie nudges the learner to keep getting better at Braille through the games they play.

5. Learning With Each Other

It’s always a lot of fun to play with others. It fosters cooperation and a competitive spirit, encourages children to have fun in communicating with each other, and creates a space for warm bonds to form between peers. And when teachers become participants in learning through play, many of the barriers children put up in treating a teacher as an authority figure begin to fall away. Social interaction is the cornerstone of such learning.

For visually impaired children, a sense of community is key to participating enthusiastically in their classes. When playing with friends, they also discover creative ways to communicate how they want to play the game, what they want from their friends while playing with them - and even develop complex communicational skills like negotiating a compromise (who gets to play with Annie next?). They talk and listen to each other, which is also key to learning from each other. Where necessary, teachers can also be involved in supporting such communication as well as encouraging friendships - they can be guides to the social landscape that the kids are finding their way around.

The Annie Smart Classes, where children take turns to learn from and play with Annie, as well as compete with their friends to make progress on their lessons and get on the games’ leaderboards, are as much a playground as a classroom. And with catchy songs and stories to talk about, we’ve been overjoyed to listen in on children sharing these experiences with their friends outside the classroom too!

Erasing the Differences between Play and Learning

Too often, play-based learning is abandoned in favour of a purely academic environment, even for young children! As we’ve learnt through Annie, this doesn’t need to happen; interactive lessons and games, with friends and teachers, can be an exciting and engaging way for visually impaired children to learn Braille. All it takes is a little bit of creativity, and a rekindling oh childlike joy and curiosity.

For most people, Braille is instantly associated with the lives of the visually impaired. But as late as the 19th century, there was no script designed for people with visual impairments to be able to read and write. Braille was a pivotal moment in the history of addressing disability rights, and today, along with its value as a tool of communication, it offers the visually impaired community ways to assert their identity. This revolutionary script has a storied history, one that begins with a blind teenager in 1820s France.

The Early Days

Louis Braille was born in 1809, in the small French town of Coupvray. Having lost his sight at the age of 5 in an accident in his father’s workshop, Braille went on to attend one of the first blind schools in the world, the Royal Institution for Blind Youth in Paris. Here, amongst his blind and visually impaired peers, and facing the condescension of school administrators who didn’t envision an independent life for a visually impaired person, young Louis sought to change the way people like him wrote and read - and hence socialized.

Braille’s spark of inspiration came in 1821 from encountering ‘night writing,’ a code of dots and dashes in thick paper that could be interpreted by touch, devised by Captain Charles Barbier of the French Army. However, with its 12 dots - where each dot stood for a letter or phonetic sound - this was too cumbersome and complicated for a blind reader to grasp at once. 15-year old Braille took this foundation, and with 6 dots, made the crucial improvement that allowed a reader to ‘read’ the entire cell unit with one impression of a fingertip and move rapidly from one cell to the next. This was the invention of the widespread system for reading and writing to be used by people who are blind or visually impaired that now bears his name, and remains basically as he invented it.

Braille remained a vociferous advocate for the blind and their education throughout his life. He published the first Braille book, Method of Writing Words, Music, and Plain Songs by Means of Dots, for Use by the Blind and Arranged for Them, in 1829, at age 20. A talented musician, he played the piano and also developed a Braille musical codification.

Still, the Braille script faced challenges from entrenched ideas of education and social inclusion - including from sighted educational authorities and the government of France. Braille’s system also made it possible for the blind to be teachers of the blind, further strengthening resistance to the raised-dot system by sighted teachers. Nevertheless, Louis Braille persisted, exhibiting the script and its benefits to many of the industrialists, luminaries, and even royalty of his time. Although he passed away in 1853 at the age of 43, a year later his home country of France adopted Braille as its official system of written communication for blind persons. The journey had begun.

Braille Makes its Mark

The first country outside France to begin using Braille was the USA, where the Missouri School for the Blind in St. Louis adopted the script in 1860. It was introduced in Britain soon after, in 1861, with consequent support by organizations such as The Royal National Institute of Blind People. In 1878, the World Congress for the Blind voted to make Braille the system of reading and writing for all blind people worldwide.

However, the widespread adoption of Braille was not without further controversy. In the United States, debate about its use delayed the acceptance of a slightly modified British version of the Braille code until 1917. A universal Braille code for the English-speaking world was not adopted until 1932, after the "war of the dots" as it became known in organizations serving the interests of blind people,  when representatives from agencies for the blind in Great Britain and the United States met in London and agreed upon a system known as Standard English Braille, also known as Grade 2 or Contracted Braille. In 1957 Anglo-American experts again met in London to further improve the system. They continued throughout the 20th century to refine the literary and music codes, created specific codes for mathematics, and responded to the need for braille computer notation.

The Global Proponents of Braille

What gave Braille this unifying strength? Quite simply, it empowered blind and visually impaired people to communicate without sighted intervention. This key necessity of human life, to record your own thoughts and read those of fellow members of your community revolutionized not just education for the blind, but how they lived. Braille allowed a community of blind alumni of various institutions to develop, and they began to publish their own stories - often in the form of memoirs - to capture the interest of a sighted readership and educate them about their unique lives. Worldwide, there are now several associations and organizations that advocate for the rights of blind and visually impaired people.

In the United States, professional associations, such as the American Association of Workers for the Blind (AAWB; established in 1905) and advocacy groups organized by blind activists emerged in the 1920s and ’30s in a number of U.S. states to organize public awareness efforts to inform their communities about the needs and interests of the blind. Many of these groups came together in 1940 to charter the National Federation of the Blind (NFB), the country’s largest advocacy group of blind people. In March 1950, UNESCO convened an International Braille Conference in Paris for developing World Braille Code that led to the establishment of the World Braille Council in 1951.

The global standardization of English Braille, however, took a while longer. In 1993, the International Council on English Braille (ICEB), with the developmental support of the Braille Authority of North America (BANA), sought to internationalize the Unified English Braille, or UEB code. From 2004 onwards, all ICEB member countries began adopting UEB. Committees organized by the ICEB continue to work on the refinement of the code and its implementation throughout the English-speaking world.

The Braille Script Today

With the standardization and global championing of Braille as a means to literacy and communication for blind and visually impaired people, 142 countries list using Braille codes.133 languages have been transcribed into 137 different Braille alphabet and punctuation codes. There are Braille bookstores. Artists and designers have created special editions of books, such as a Braille version of Message, a poetry book by Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa, crossovers with standard typographies such as the Kobi Serif, and a festival called the Blind Creations Conference in England that kicked off in 2015

Technological innovation has made Braille even more accessible. Devices such as refreshable Braille displays and word-to-audio narration device kurzweil 3000 that uses the braille translator Duxbury DBT have gained widespread acceptance. A Braille note-taker app for the iPad called iBrailler Notes offers a way to quickly type Braille notes on a touchscreen. In 2014, the first commercially affordable 3D printed braille phone also hit the market by OwnPhone. In 2018, we at Thinkerbell Labs released the world’s first Braille self-learning device, Annie.

Braille, through its long history, has come to be a powerful social and creative force for the blind and visually impaired, a sign of the community. It’s a sea change in education and independent living. It’s a shift in how society at large views blindness. As the influential Dr. Jana Schroeder, who’s led several international Braille and blindness organizations put it, “By reshaping society’s assumptions about blindness, we can begin replacing the belief that minimal functioning is all that can be expected from the blind [and] Braille...takes its rightful place as the means to literacy for the blind.”

Language is a means to make sense of our world, the only way of turning thought into text and speech. The written script of a language allows us to record our thoughts and our knowledge, and share information with others in our communities who we might not be able to directly speak to. No matter the language the script is written in, then, Braille is an indispensable part of the lives of people with visual impairments. Braille is key for these persons to shape their community, asserting themselves as a group of people woven through society at large with their own ways of reading and writing it.

This journey with language starts young. For children with visual impairments, then, learning Braille is an important stepping stone to their broader education. Unfortunately, achieving Braille literacy is a complex and ill-addressed challenge. Even in countries where Braille has a long history - such as the US - Braille literacy rates are extremely low, to the point that filling this gap means pretty much starting from scratch. So what are the complexities of Braille that we need to think about?

Braille’s Unique Touch

For persons with visual impairments, their sense of touch becomes the primary way to ‘sense’ the world around them. The Braille script is uniquely suited to this means of perception - it is, unlike most other language scripts, tactile. Someone with visual impairments reads Braille with their kinaesthetic sense; they can, quite literally, feel words. And with the simplicity of how the characters feel, as their precise location on paper (or even screens), and its reproducibility across languages, Braille has a lot going for it.

To those who use the Braille script in their daily lives, it goes beyond the page. Braille is not simply a method of receiving or recording knowledge or information - to many, Braille is an inseparable component of their life and identity. Braille is the symbol of visually impaired persons’ presence as an influencing social group who seeks visibility and participation. The usage of Braille is considered by the visually impaired community as assurance that society at large cares about their rights and needs. While it is true that with technological means - such as screen readers - information can reach them through other resources, turning these texts into Braille can make people with visual impairments feel that their community believes in, and seeks to preserve their particular values as a human being, exactly as visual language scripts do for others.

Of course, Braille isn't just a replacement for writing. It is easy to forget how important colours, logos, symbols and other visual signposting are to working out what something is. Being able to label clothing, food stuffs and domestic appliances around the home helps blind or partially sighted people live independently. Items such as washing machines can be almost impossible for a blind person to use unless the controls have raised or clear print markings to indicate the different settings or uses of each knob or dial. When introduced at an early age, knowing Braille even has a significant impact on chances of future employment.

This means that, quite simply, learning Braille is a matter of major importance to people with visual impairments. Teaching children the script is easier when introduced to its form and essential units - the alphabet and numbers, for a start - early in their education. Such an education in Braille even has a significant impact on children’s psychological and social development. The benefits are evident - unfortunately, the pathways to obtain these benefits, not so much. Why aren’t visually impaired children able to access these benefits like they should be able to?

Why Braille Literacy is Difficult to Achieve

Education of any form isn’t an isolated project that’s free of socioeconomic, cultural, and political forces swirling around it. This is doubly true of education for the visually impaired, with further obstacles imposed by the insufficient understanding of their specific social and policy-based needs, as well as the lack of adequate resources dedicated to these needs.

Despite its many strengths, there are some particular challenges associated with teaching and learning the Braille script. At a purely educational level, visually impaired children require close attention from their teachers in order to find their way with this unique script. Teachers often need to individually aid Braille learners with touch and a sense of the ‘space’ of the text. Braille isn’t just about the script either - just like with learning any other language script, reading instruction and basic literacy processes such as phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, and written language must be taught from the very beginning. The assessment of a child’s learning, then, depends not only on their ability to read and write (and maybe even type) in Braille, but also their grasp of concepts they may encounter in their everyday lives, reading comprehension and their ability to make sense of the world through other means such as listening skills that compound their knowledge of Braille. This means that teachers often need to be more closely involved in the student’s learning and assessment than is the case with sighted or visual learning. There have been few changes in the way Braille has been taught for decades that seek to address these issues.

There have also been some controversies around Braille’s usefulness in recent years. On a pragmatic level, Braille texts can be difficult and expensive to produce, with limited portability. With the advent of assistive technologies, audio books, and screen readers, Braille is assumed to be out of date. However, these underestimate what Braille can mean to visually impaired children, and its adaptability to technological innovations.

There’s a cultural hesitance in elevating what would allow people with visual impairments to shape their own lives, and instead the focus is on providing a limited means of access to the sighted world. Braille users note the ease with which they can use it in classrooms and at work meetings, and its usefulness in navigating public spaces. Technologies such as refreshable Braille displays and the incorporation of Braille into everyday technologies, such as smartphones, enhance them for the use of swathes of users with visual impairments. Braille illiteracy takes away access to these freedoms.

There are also social, economic, and cultural barriers that have translated into choices of policy that have further limited the widespread teaching of Braille. Generally, people with visual impairments are a political and economic minority, with little power in the policy-making process. Hence, little attention is paid to how they can participate in society, such as by learning Braille. Decisions around the education of visually impaired people are taken by sighted people, who may not always understand their needs as well as someone belonging to that community.

This vacuum, however, has begun to change. In the US and UK for example, #CripTheVote activists have campaigned to bring disability issues - such as the right to education - to the forefront. In India, there’s a web of legislation such as the Persons with Disabilities Act 2016 that broadly advocates for structural policy such as free education till the age of 18 years in integrated schools or special.schools and learning materials, development of appropriate learning environments and teacher training etc. The National Policy for Persons with Disabilities from 2006 also supports such overarching guidelines, along with central government schemes for education for people with disabilities.

Still, education for people with visual impairments - and opportunities for learning Braille - are still limited in scope. As of 2016, only 8.5% of American visually impaired students are identified as Braille readers. Braille illiteracy contributes to high unemployment rates for blind and visually impaired people, estimated to be 75 percent in Europe (according to the European Blind Union) and 70 percent in the United States, according to Cornell University’s Disability Statistics. These numbers are even higher on a global scale.

This can be at least partly attributed to the lack of specific policy on designing classrooms and educational initiatives aimed at empowering visually impaired children to learn about the evolving world in ways that allow them to take charge of their education and lives. In India, for example,the specifics of legislation related to inclusive and special education is left to lower federal levels such as the State, and their implementation at even lower levels such as the district. This means there is little coherence in educational approaches for the visually impaired.

Another major barrier in India’s case is limited opportunities for Braille education because parents and families of blind children - who may not have had access to good educational opportunities, or steady income themselves - often are unable to realize the value of educating their child. Even when in school, children may not receive sufficient training because very few teachers are themselves trained to teach Braille. Poorer regions of the country tend to have both a disproportionately high number of blind people and so fewer resources for educating them.

These challenges arise from circumstances of the people with disabilities, and a pattern of choices on the part of decision-makers. These choices can be different, better. Through a set of changes to how we think about and address Braille literacy, there are ways forward.

Paths to Better Braille Literacy

In recent years, there has been a push to ‘center’ people - be they learners in educational settings, users of products, or citizens with disabilities of a country - in designing and developing what they need to get the most out of their interactions with the world around them. To ensure Braille literacy is widespread and effectively reaches the people who would benefit from it the most, then, requires centering visually impaired children in how we develop the paths to Braille literacy.

What are the considerations for such learner- and disability-centred education? Most importantly, it’s that no fixed approach would be enough. Especially in children’s developmental phases, variable and person-centred approaches can go a long way in helping various students adapt to the needs of the classroom through means that help them leverage their individual strengths. The Learner-Centered Psychological Principles (or LCPs) offer a framework for these approaches. These include attention to individual developmental differences, appreciation of what the student is most interested in studying while setting appropriate challenges, teaching analytical and comprehension-based higher order thinking skills, and - among the most important for children with disabilities - creating positive interpersonal relationships with their peers and teachers. Inclusion is a value and a belief system that is rooted in concrete action.

Key to inclusive learner-centred education is the role of the teacher in the classroom. Those trained in the needs of children with disabilities can help the child navigate educational systems that weren’t necessarily built for them. Teachers used to teaching sighted children can also evolve their instructional strategies in partnership with both disabled students themselves as well as family and other instructors who have previously taught them and are specifically attuned to the child’s disability. In such forms of education, collaborative learning often becomes an important feature of classrooms, giving the teacher time to coach individual students and groups per their differences in learning methods. Students also have time to act as coaches for each other, allowing them to learn from each other and fill their gaps in knowledge, find new social groups to interact with, and try different modes of pacing and (self-)assessment.

Specifically for learners in and of Braille, the visual nature of most classrooms means that there must be an active shift towards a mix of text and audio tools to record and understand what is being taught in the classroom. For example, while some teachers may not mandate note-taking for visually impaired children, assuming they would lag behind their sighted peers, encouraging this practice means that these children assume their own strategies in recording and analysing the education imparted to them in a script that matches their preferences, i,e., in Braille. Ensuring that curricula are designed around including texts that are available in Braille, as well as texts that discuss Braille and represent the points of view of people with visual impairments.

In a case study noting the importance of guided literacy initiatives, Ilda Carreiro King notes that:

The...special needs student would take home an audiotape of his text-book and follow along as he listened. Because research has found that listening to books on tape does not improve comprehension unless the student is subsequently asked to read the text aloud to someone who can give feedback, the teacher in-corporated paired reading with coaching into her class….In addition, an expanding vocabulary and knowledge of a topic gained initially from reading books at his level generally helped him access more and more difficult books on the topic, swelling his pride in his accomplishments and feelings of being a true contributing member of the class. The teacher found that these techniques enriched learning for all members of the class.

It’s with teachers and their peers, then, that visually impaired children become part of a classroom that fosters an inclusive culture - from belief to norms to practice. Through  collaboration, such classrooms provide seamless delivery of appropriate services to every student. By examining the cultural and ethical factors that encourage what is considered by the learner as inclusive practice, communities of learning can be more vibrant and thriving in difference.

Outside the educational sphere, however, there are still political and policy factors that are essential in laying the paths to Braille literacy. Policy-making can help address challenges, such as by standardizing approaches to Braille in blind schools across the country, accelerated by cheaper production and technological tools. Elevating Braille’s place in education will lend coherence to addressing illiteracy among the visually impaired, as a common point of beginning to address wider challenges. For example, with Bharati Braille that includes several major Indian languages, children can be taught to read and write in their own vernacular languages, providing a means to understanding the world in the languages they hear spoken around them. Braille can also improve citizens with visual impairments to participate in political processes, such as with the introduction of ballot papers in Braille.

The mission, at the end of the day, is for a comprehensive education to reach as many visually impaired children as possible through a variety of strategies. Increasingly, these strategies can also be through technological means - like with education for sighted children, there are new ways for visually impaired children to learn too.

EdTech’s Role in Braille Education

Braille education has remained more or less unchanged for decades. This has largely been due to the assumption that Braille is its own (analogue) medium, one that’s separate from digital and electronic technologies that are largely assistive - not instructive. But it’s not a good idea to treat such tech as either superseding Braille or ignoring their benefits for Braille use itself. Educational technologies that make use of such advances, without sacrificing the particular strengths of Braille, are one example of how technological innovation can complement Braille learning.

One of the key ways Braille learning can be updated is through bringing in multimodality. By utilizing the dynamic potential of combining hardware and software in increasingly portable forms, the tactile script of Braille can be supported by oral instructions that can be recorded and replayed to guide students. This also means education can be interactive without the need for constant human intervention - through educational games and intuitive feedback made possible on the same device, learners can learn from and correct their mistakes on the fly. Self-paced and self-directed learning, that allows students to adopt learning styles that they’re comfortable with, can also be made easily accessible through digitally stored learning materials that can be recalled anytime across hardware. For educators too, this means stepping away from micromanaging a student’s learning journey, and being able to take a wider view of their classrooms and focusing on the pedagogical and social elements of their teaching.

We’ve long recognized the strengths of technology in making Braille learning a more accessible and exciting experience - it’s what inspired our development of Annie, the world’s first Braille self-learning innovation. By presenting interactive and gamified learning materials that take advantage of the language-neutral form of the Braille script, we’ve been able to reach hundreds of students across the world with the companionable Annie guiding their education. Alongside a learner-centered approach to lesson pacing and ample opportunities to practice their Braille skills, Annie also provides a learning ecosystem that situates them in their classrooms and broader world. Excited kids talking about the games they play and the stories they’re made a part of have shown us that this is a way for students to talk to each other about what they’ve learnt in a natural and friendly way.

A Broad View on Braille Literacy

When it comes to how we can vastly improve the metrics of Braille literacy, we’re optimists at Thinkerbell Labs. We believe that its challenges are surmountable, and we have an array of tools, pedagogies, and technologies at our disposal to help. Still, we recognise that it is a long process, one that requires widespread and often structural changes. We hope to contribute to that by collaborating with schools, governments and most importantly, the children and educators themselves. The drops can add up to an ocean - one that quenches the thirst for knowledge that so many children with visual impairments have.

Find out how you can use Annie to tackle the issue of Braille illiteracy

The written language scripts we learn are key to observing and recording our world. Learning Braille, then, is a valuable bridge to comprehending the world for people with visual impairments - and as with any other form of learning, it is often helped greatly by a guide, a teacher, a companion. But the role of such a guide and the form they may take in someone’s educational journey is changing with our world, and education for visually impaired children must reflect those changes.

Self-learning, also called self-directed or self-regulated learning, is now commonly recognized as an important approach to getting learners invested in their own education. It’s a means to make sense of their world in ways that make sense to them, through their own senses. This doesn’t mean that the role of an educational guide, a kind of teacher, is made redundant - but it does evolve. The educator needs to interact with the learner in a more engaging manner, providing feedback based on the needs of the learner, rather than the presumptions of the educator.

With the low number of qualified teachers for visually impaired children, especially in India, and the typical micro-engagement (often at a one-on-one level) between the educational guide and the learner in Braille education, it’s evident why we need to rethink Braille learning. It is here that educational technology - such as Thinkerbell Labs’ Annie - can fold interactivity, gamification and feedback in support of self-learning.

Choosing How to Learn

The key element to self-learning is choice: enabling students to choose what they’d like to learn, when, and how - in short, the student largely directs their own learning. This is also intended to encourage students’ adaptability to different pedagogies and modes of learning. By trusting that learners know their own strengths and how to apply these to their education, they have the space to cultivate their own educational strategies and skills. Simultaneously, self-learning is also a chance for students to learn new cognitive skills - how to select, combine, and coordinate strategies to help themselves learn better. There might be certain aspects of what they learn that they choose to engage with deeply, others more casually - these shifts are to be entrusted to the learner. This represents a “paradigm shift in how students conceive of and approach their learning, with a major reorientation in students' assumptions and expectations about teaching and learning.”

Still, the classroom as we know it has some major strengths: it offers a way to learn with students at the same age and with similar skill sets, encourages socialization, and has the consistent support of the teacher - an experienced educational guide. In fact, such learning environments can facilitate the development of self-learning skills too, applicable both in and outside the classroom.

So how can we ensure learners have access to the benefits of a classroom environment when they’re learning on their own? With the advent of technology- and computer-enhanced learning, it seems we might have an answer. Several studies have found that the use of technological tools - from computer laboratories, to incorporating students' everyday phone use into their education, to developing educational technologies specifically for students’ needs - motivates students to engage with academics to positive results. Such students are keen to participate in self-learning activities, and take greater responsibility for their own learning.

We have observed - and enabled - these shifts in learning with Annie, our Braille self-learning innovation. While most learners use Annie in classroom-like Annie Smart Classes guided by their teachers, they also have the opportunity to pick which lessons they want to learn from on a given day, which games to play, what to revise and what new skill (reading, writing, and typing in Braille) they want to practice. They are free to repeat lessons, diving into them at their preferred pace. There is no push to keep progressing, but they have the freedom to explore learning materials independently of their peers. Still, they have their teacher to guide their learning when necessary, and peers to share what they’ve learnt. Across Annie Smart Classes, we’ve observed this approach dramatically improve students’ performance in Braille skills.

How Do We Learn?

Braille, unlike most other language scripts, is tactile. It’s closer to the reader - the learner - than others. This makes Braille well-suited to the cycle of self-learning, involving (1) forethought,  (2) performance or volitional control and (3) self-reflection, where the learner engages directly with the learning material in Braille in both thought and action, and where a teacher may not be able to provide constant, granular feedback without the risk of intruding on the self-learning process - a level of interaction that’s unrealistic in regular classroom environments.

Learning Braille, then, can be made more effective and exciting through multimodal learning - engaging both auditory and kinaesthetic senses to help children with visual impairments form their own understanding of the visual world sighted people are used to.  After all, the learning process - like any form of communication - depends on a number of ways to make sense of the world, motivated by the interests of the learner, their perceptual and cognitive strengths, and their environments.

Blending self-learning and multimodal mechanisms allows students to feel more comfortable with their preferred learning style and perform better, learning concepts through text and audio, real-world examples, and interactive lessons. From in-class texts, to homework and assignments, to feedback - everything can be multimodal.

Technology and computer-enabled learning is particularly useful in presenting multiple ways to learn, both in what children can learn and how. Annie’s mix of Braille cells, keyboard, Brailler and audio output, for example, provides learners with a variety of ways to read, write and type in Braille, as well as match auditory instructions to the Braille script. With these multimodal pedagogies that allow students to question their long-held beliefs or knowledge, they can learn to change and challenge their own learning. This improves students’ understanding and retention of what they’ve learnt, their confidence in class, their interest and enjoyment of learning, and ultimately, a lasting commitment to their education.

How Do We Learn Better?

For the self-learner figuring out the many (multimodal) methods of learning out there, three things are key to a deep learning experience: interactivity, feedback, and gamification. Per a classic study describing “The Learning Pyramid,” using learnt skills and knowledge immediately, and participating in discussion groups pegs retention rates at 90% and 75% respectively. It’s evident that deeply interactive learning, when coupled with quality gamified lessons, and regular and comprehensive feedback, facilitates deep learning by actively engaging the learner in their own education.

For technology-enabled interactivity, it’s important for learning materials and the interactive element to be based on the skills of the learner, rather than the capabilities of the technology. This interaction has three actions:

1. The device presents the interactive element to the learner (computer initiation),
2. Learner presses the button or on the Braille element (learner response),
3. Presentation of new information to learner (computer feedback).

Done right, this interactivity balances the independence of the learner’s response with its relevance to the learning material. The feedback, meanwhile, uses the direct response to explain the concepts that the student is learning.

If this sounds drily mechanical, it’s because it can be. That’s why gamification is so useful - by using game thinking and design that utilize innovative rewards such as high scores, as well as the sheer joy of playing, interactive lessons can be remarkably motivational learning tools. These games are aligned with learning objectives, but more than traditionally one-sided lessons, take the learners’ motivations and attitudes to learning more seriously. They are engaging and rich in multimodal and multimedia elements. In the gamification of education, learners have the opportunity to repeatedly try multiple paths to the gamified lesson’s objectives with scaling difficulty levels - such as in Braille, learning to read certain letters of the alphabet at increasing speeds. These ‘games’ are also realistic about what can be achieved through such gamification - they aren’t meant to substitute for example, creative thinking.

We’ve recognized the strengths of interactivity, in all its forms, in students learning with Annie. The interactive lessons - that gently provide feedback at key points of the lessons; the games that help children hone their performance and speed in using Braille as well as compare their scores with their peers on a leaderboard for that extra competitive nudge; the Helios suite that enables feedback from teachers by tracking student performance and helping teachers prepare their future lessons accordingly.

Adapting to self-learning

Bringing self-learning to the way children with visual impairments learn Braille - including in the classroom - is not a straightforward task. Learning materials need to be reworked, pedagogies rethought, classrooms redesigned. It’s important to keep in mind that self-learning involves a shift in thinking for both learner and educator, and the particular strengths of the classroom - such as learning with friends, and including them in social circles - is not overridden by self-learning. The good news is these changes can be adapted to more easily with the help of technology.

With Annie, we’ve learnt of both the power and complexities of technology-enabled self-learning. We’ve found students grow more excited and invested in Braille, without needing to separate the enjoyment of learning from the educational environment. Annie let them pick up the lessons they were interested in, and they’ve raced ahead of their existing knowledge. At the same time, by recognizing the need for teachers to manage the overall learning environment and help their students navigate these new modes of learning, we’ve stepped back from what self-learning cannot achieve. With touch, sound, and - we think - quite a lot of fun, Braille self-learning can be a wonderful new way for visually impaired children to learn about the world.

Every story has a turning point. For Annie and its unique place in Braille learning, one of the most important points early in its story was the Annie Smart Class at Rajyakrit Netrahin Madhya Vidyalaya, a blind school in Ranchi, Jharkhand - India’s first Braille Smart Class, set up in July 2018. This was Thinkerbell Labs’ first major deployment of the Annie learning ecosystem - a trial by fire for our tech, and the partnerships we believed in would bring innovative education to the ones who could benefit from it the most.

The Ranchi Annie Smart Class, or ASC, turned out to be a tremendous success. The students and teachers were immediately taken with the Annies, and the technological innovation has had a marked impact on Braille learning. We’ve set up several more such classrooms since, but many of our product, logistical, and operational processes have been influenced by the lessons we learned there. Annie as a means to improved Braille learning and an ecosystem came into its own here.

Kickstarting the Classroom

Annie was launched worldwide in 2018, and quickly gathered acclaim from a number of outlets and platforms. When Thinkerbell Labs won at the INFOCOM Future Leadership Awards 2017, we were approached by an official from the Government of Jharkhand who, impressed with Annie, invited us to set up India’s first Braille smart class in Ranchi. Through this, we established a partnership with the then-DC for Ranchi, Rai Mahimapat Ray, who was enthusiastic about Annie’s potential to improve the quality of education for children with visual impairments. Having worked with the District Administration to identify the blind school that would be our first Annie partnership, we were ready to make our first Annie Smart Class the benchmark for Braille learning in India.

Our work on the Ranchi ASC began with understanding the specific conditions of the blind school, and how Annie would best serve the needs of the students and teachers there. Simultaneously, in these early days of Thinkerbell Labs, we were learning how we would need to adapt to the demands of our work on the fly. It was important to the team to be agile and conscientious, aware of the challenges we’d have to overcome while centering our partners in the school and district administration.

In Preparation for India’s First Braille Smart Class

At Thinkerbell Labs, we believe that students must be partners in their learning. At the Ranchi ASC, this meant a close understanding of how to make Braille learning appealing to these young children. It was important for Annie to communicate with them in familiar ways - so alongside English Braille learning material, we developed the content in Hindi, as well as material to teach them the English alphabet through audio-based Hindi instructions. The learning materials and instructions incorporated stories, music and sounds that offered a more informal learning environment for the young learner, while also being designed for these learners to better their skills in specific facets of Braille, like reading, typing, and writing. This principle extended to the gamified lessons we’d developed, with leaderboards that let the children have a friendly sense of competition. This eventually led to a huge spike in Annie interest and use.

At the same time, we understood that Annie needed to work as a guided companion for the learner. To reduce the complexity of having to navigate a new system, we built linearity into the lessons to start with, and as the students got more comfortable with Annie, they had the option to choose what they wanted to learn and how. We also added little touches to make the Annies student-friendly and familiar as a teacher, such as adding a welcome message that would say their name in their teacher’s voice. Many of the lessons we learnt here became key to the success of future ASCs, spearheaded by the Learning Experience, or LEX team that was eventually established within our company.

There were also elements of the Annie ecosystem developed specifically for the Ranchi Annie Smart Class that have since become standard features. The login system, for example, was designed so the many students that had access to the Annies in the classroom could login to any device at any time and have a personalized experience, with records of their progress and such. To ensure that this connectivity was smoothly integrated into the ASC without needing to rely on the unsteady internet connectivity, we set up a local server which would connect to the Annies within the classroom. Helios, the performance tracking suite for the Annie Smart Class, was also developed at record speeds so we could have a comprehensive tool for teachers to support the learning happening in the ASC.

To make all of this happen, we were working overtime - developing and finalizing content with experts, recording it with a voiceover artist, encoding the content onto Annie and preparing it all for the ASC to be set up in time. The making of the Annies themselves, from assembly to the deployment, was a learning experience for us too, ably supported by our partners at the school and administration. The team fondly remembers those days as a formative experience for the company, a highlight that established the strong bonds among them.

These experiences shaped much of how Thinkerbell Labs itself operates. Until the Ranchi ASC, Annie had only been deployed in “sandboxes” and test scenarios, so adapting it to a real-world setting was a huge change. For example, the geographical distance between the school and the company office meant updates to the Annies’ content and software would have to be done ‘over the air,’ i.e., through the internet - capability that the team quickly built so the ASC would be comprehensively equipped to stay up to date with our developments. Even with the pressures of time, though, the team always prioritized the quality of what we built - not just in the essentials but in every facet that made Annie what it is, down to the glossy finish of the device’s exterior. Everyone in the company - across teams - got their hands dirty in building Annie, getting to understand the nuts and bolts, the ins and outs of the electronics and hardware components of Annie.This grew to be a huge strength of the company, as anyone on any team could pick apart, build and debug an Annie.

The run up to the setting Ranchi ASC deployment set us on a progressive path for how the entire company worked. It elevated our sense of professionalism, structure, internal and external accountability, and set us on a path of rigorous learning and self-improvement. We developed well-structured methods to set up Annie Smart Classes and ensure their smooth functioning. We learnt how to pass on the individual knowledge of team members to each other, as well as to our partners in the school, primarily the teachers. As the days to the final deployment of the Annie Smart Class and its accompanying ecosystem at Ranchi drew near, we knew we had something truly great on our hands.

At Ranchi

Setting up the Ranchi Annie Smart Class on the ground involved several of our partners. From the school, the headmaster, Mr. Rauvish, a visually impaired teacher, Mr. Ramesh, and the teacher who guided the students’ interactions with computers, Mr. Manish worked closely with our team. We also had the backing throughout the deployment of the DC and his team. Working together, we focused on those who were most important to the success of our work: the students.

The students - and the teachers - loved Annie, introduced by Mr. Manish as the students’ new teacher. For everyone involved in the deployment, it was a moment of real pride to share in the learner’s exploration of Annie, the lessons and the games, the collaboration and competition we were hoping would shine through in this Braille smart class. Many from the first batch of students who got to use Annie helped those who came after them learn with their Annies. Excited by the chance to get on the leaderboards, the children couldn’t keep away from long sessions with the games - each point on Whack-a-Braille, each letter spelt in Letter Race refining their skills in various forms of engagement with Braille. With our partners in learning, we had set up India’s first Annie Smart Class - a leap forward in how Braille could be taught and learnt. As our CEO and co-founder, Sanskriti recollects, this was a moment of triumph - put into words by a teacher at the school: “Ranchi jaise sheher mein London jaisi technology (In a city like Ranchi, we now have technology like London’s).”

In the Days (and Years) that Followed

The Annie Smart Class at Ranchi was a validation of Thinkerbell Labs’ mission, of building means to social inclusion for children with visual impairments through technology-enabled Braille learning. Through Helios, the performance tracking suite, we witnessed the everyday use and progressive betterment of the children’s Braille skills. The principles of inclusive design that we had adopted had demonstrable significance in how technology could be used. We had risen to the challenge of building this ecosystem of education that was unlike anything else made for visually impaired children.

As it turned out, enrollment in the blind school at Ranchi increased after we’d set up the Annie Smart Class, as people from nearby villages started sending their children to the school hearing about the ASC, thinking, as Sanskriti narrates, that “bachcha kuch technology seekhega kuch banega.” Thinking back, Dilip Ramesh, our co-founder and CTO, notes that working on this first smart class “felt like the beginning of something great.” Clearly, it was.

Great products come from great ideas, ideas that customers want to buy into because of the unique strengths of that product. But for a successful company, it would be hasty to think a product sale is the finish line. For a company with a mission beyond the ‘product,’ it’s essential to step outside the company-customer binary. When a company blends innovative and compelling work while actively seeking to advance social good in particular, it can't just 'sell its product' - it has to forge mutually beneficial partnerships.

At Thinkerbell Labs, we work towards the mission of social inclusion, specifically, inclusive education through technological innovation in Braille learning. We collaborate with a range of people and organizations in order to actively participate in and contribute to this mission - not just now, but for years to come. Indeed, our flagship innovation, Annie, is part of a broader ecosystem that allows us to work closely with the visually impaired children who learn with Annie, as well as those who are invested in bettering these children’s learning outcomes. This is why we think of ecosystems, not products; partnerships, not sales; partners, not customers. We aim to be a uniquely progressive partner in the present and future of Braille learning - and we recognize the responsibility that comes with this mission.

Inclusion through Educational Technology

For children with visual impairments, learning is simultaneously a personal and social experience. Braille learning in particular is a time- and resource-intensive task. The learner typically requires lots of practice, and the teacher needs to pay close attention to these learners, their students, often at a 1-on-1 level. This has led to a severe crisis in Braille education, where not enough teachers are available to effectively teach the many visually impaired students who are eager to learn. It was in trying to address this crisis that we at Thinkerbell Labs arrived at our key insight - that technology can enable the learner to take charge of their education, while enjoying all the benefits of a classroom environment.

Educational technology initiatives have often significantly changed how learning and teaching has been accomplished. Remote learning over the internet, for example, has been touted as an useful educational tool during the COVID-19 pandemic. Simultaneously, however, these methods have faced criticism for not accounting for less privileged sections of society - such as persons with disabilities - whose conditions of access to technology are different.

At Thinkerbell Labs, however, we’ve always believed in the prime importance of education being accessible to, and inclusive of, many kinds of learners - it is this commitment that guided our development of Annie. Visually impaired children must have access to innovative methods of learning that take into consideration their specific sensory and educational requirements, and the modalities that they might be comfortable with while engaging with learning materials. This involves teaching Braille through pedagogies that empower the learner to understand their world through everyday experiences - which is the deeper purpose of education. It’s also important to remember that there are scores of children with disabilities in remote parts of India, (and the world) who may not have direct access to the internet, but might have access to a classroom, where they learn by themselves, with their peers, and with teachers, just like sighted children. So while the internet might not be the same gateway to learning as it is for the more privileged of us, this does not mean that visually impaired children be deprived of other technological innovations that are tailored to their needs.

This is the understanding that we at Thinkerbell Labs brought to our work. From our earliest days, when our founding team recognized the importance of learning Braille themselves before developing Annie, we recognized that we needed to put our mission before the innovation, to put the needs of Braille learners and teachers in classrooms that hadn’t been afforded the advances of educational technology before what we thought their learning should be like.

We wanted to preserve the child’s ability to learn Braille as they wanted to without needing the teacher’s constant attention. Over the course of several trials, working directly with visually impaired children, and in line with well-regarded existing curricula like the Royal National Institute for the Blind’s Hans On scheme, we developed interactive and gamified learning exercises for Braille reading, writing and typing. We’ve developed the world’s first Braille self-learning device in Annie. All of the games and lessons that the learner engages with lives on Annie itself, without the need for a constant internet connection to login and begin learning. Content and software updates are passed on to Annie whenever internet access is available. Supported by teachers, such pedagogies are a new experience in Braille education, an engagement with the tactile and aural elements of worldly experience that hadn’t been achieved with traditional methods of learning.

At the same time, our research showed us that the best way to support such education was to create Annie Smart Classes, that brought our innovation into the classroom environment, leveraging the relationship that students had with their teachers, and each other, supported by the Helios suite, which allowed teachers to measure students’ performance. This is where our particular approach to deployments was forged, with the understanding that we couldn’t “sell” such a concept - we had to partner with schools, administrations and other organizations to shape successful educational environments.

Beyond the ‘Sale’

The first deployment of an Annie Smart Class in India was at a government-supported blind school in Ranchi, Jharkhand. Since then, we’ve partnered with several administrations across the country, like the corporate foundations such as SELCO and Tech Mahindra Foundation, and non-profit organizations such as the National Federation of the Blind Maharashtra and Silver Linings to set up Annie Smart Classes in blind schools and in inclusive schools such as the Chantry Primary Academy in Luton, UK. These organizations have supported our work reaching the children who need it the most, at schools that can benefit from innovative Braille learning.

We value these partnerships we have built in support of our mission, because we understand that every partner is taking a leap with us into a future of inclusion and innovation based on the trust they have in our work and our team. When our partners subscribe to our vision they too go the extra mile in making the Annie Smart Classes they support successful. They believe in the future we are building and they want to be a part of this learning ecosystem. To describe those with whom we have such deep collaborations as ‘customers’ would be, to us, too simplistic.

It is, after all, through these relationships that we reach the partners we’re closest to, the children who learn with Annie. Because it’s only in partnering with those who engage, directly and everyday, with our learning ecosystem can we truly build an inclusive form of education. Along with our partnering organizations and schools, we’re constantly engaged in working with teachers and students to improve learning outcomes over an extended period of time - this is only possible with sustained communication, where we can work together to help realize Annie’s value, and hence measure the impact we’re making on our overarching mission of Braille literacy. This is also why we make it a point to have our team personally involved in the setting up of Annie Smart Classes at schools, so our partners are more comfortable interacting with us, helping us address their concerns and queries. By demonstrating our commitment to the innovations we are bringing to an existing learning ecosystem, we strive to ensure a smooth integration of the innovations of the Annie ecosystem.

The Mission Ecosystem

The mission of inclusive education keeps growing at Thinkerbell Labs. There’s a lot to do, and we intend to keep innovating our approaches to this work based on the twin pillars of technology and partnerships. Starting with Braille literacy enabled us to effectively understand the challenges that come with our work, and consider how we can best contribute to the social mission. At the same time, it has cemented our confidence in the Annie learning ecosystem, its value in the lives of visually impaired children and their educators, as well as the strength of partnering with organizations with a stake in the success of our ecosystem. At the end of the day, it is the human connection among everyone participating in our mission that makes it so successful.