How do you translate training the eye to training the fingers? How do you address the different cognitive practices and activities needed by young children with low or no vision as they get ready for a life of independent access to information?

Whether they want to become adaptive ice climbers, artists, or computer programmers, kids with low or no vision need to be able to read words and images, and know that their communication matters. For these kids, there are easily learnable and shareable ways you can adapt your early literacy campaign to be more inclusive.

Braille for Independence

While audio books and technology are booming and wonderful, they do not eliminate the need for independent reading and writing in braille, or the importance of developing skills in understanding spatial relations and tactile images.

Why braille literacy is crucial to optimal independence and success:

• Those who read braille have a much higher chance of gaining employment—critical in a community that has a 70% unemployment rate overall, while the rate of braille literacy among those who are employed is 85%

• Braille fluency is needed for certain key skills including: proofreading; reading aloud; understanding complex material such as mathematics and code; understanding spelling and punctuation; privately taking notes at school or work; independently reading signage; using the internet, email, MS Office, and more with a refreshable braille display, regardless of whether the content owner has taken on the task of making their work accessible to screenreaders.

Adapted activities and tweaked skills   

The five key practices that parents are taught to encourage pre-literacy skills stay the same, but the details differ. For instance: 

Reading: While a parent of a sighted child might run their finger under words while reading the sounds aloud, the caregiver of a blind child would move the child’s hand to touch braille letters while speaking them aloud. This is important even for very young children, to begin associating touch with words. While reading, include real objects in the story to ground it in real associations and connections. Describe the images out loud.

Talking: Describe things your child hears, feels, smells, and tastes. For example, "That loud grinding is the garbage truck picking up the garbage again."  Use a wide variety of descriptive words.

Playing: Young children with low vision may move around their world less. Encourage them to explore with play. This teaches problem-solving, imagination, new words, and the motor skills needed for reading braille. Provide toys with lots of sounds and tactile interests, and encourage your child to grasp, move toward, or interact with them.

Writing: Provide thick, dark markers for high contrast on white paper, or make textured lines by pressing hard onto paper on a semisoft surface or with a commercial tactile drawing pad. Encourage tactile art with textured or scented paint, wax sticks, even cooked spaghetti. Provide dots to create play braille. Use sequins, googly eyes, or children’s clay.

For more information, download the full brochure here.  *

Pictures Matter

Images are not based on vision, but can be considered spatial information. Being able to mentally decode two-dimensional images such as tactile maps, art, charts, and diagrams can help with all kinds of activities, interests, and professions later in life. Also, quite simply, pictures are part of the world around kids so understanding them is part of understanding the world they live in.

Bathmat octopus tentacles (and other things you can do)

We're offering early braille and tactile literacy kits available to anyone with a New York Public Library card. There are six levels of kits and they include tactile mazes, pattern matching games, nursery rhyme books with braille stickers and embossed images, play braille, braille labellers, and high-contrast books with textural elements.

You can find the entire catalog here, and click on each title to view its contents. 

You can also create your own materials. Online resources such as Paths to Literacy and the American Foundation of the Blind inspire you to create tactile books from everyday objects—a particularly inspired one uses bathmat suction cups to create octopus tentacles.

What else? You can use everyday materials to make pattern-matching games similar to the one pictured above. You can get free copies of Because Books Matter and Because Pictures Matter in English and Spanish from the National Braille Press. And you can find many more activities and tips at pathstoliteracy.org,

The full-length version of this blog post is available on the Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC) website. 

* Brochure created by: Briana Albright, Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh LBPH, Children's Specialist; Carrie Banks, Brooklyn Public Library, Inclusive Services Librarian; Mark Lee, Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh LBPH, Library Services Administrator; Susan Pannebaker, Commonwealth Libraries of Pennsylvania, Youth Services Coordinator; Jill Rothstein, New York Public Library's Andrew Heiskell Braille and Talking Book Library, Chief Librarian