Callie Sandel
Transcription
Please tell us a little bit about yourself.
My name is Callie Sandel. I am a first year student at Clemson University. I got my undergrad from Winthrop University. I grew up here in the Midlands. I went to Lexington High School and this is still where my family lives, in the Lexington-Columbia area.
What is your experience today, using braille in everyday life?
Braille is not something I use every single day, but when the time comes that I do need to use it, it's wonderful for finding room numbers in an unfamiliar building, reading agendas, reading little tidbits of information. I know that I've used song lyrics when everybody is singing the same song instead of having the page right in front of my face and trying to figure out the words and getting left behind. Just little things like that, it really comes in handy. I've started using it when I have to give speeches in front of a class, having notes in braille on a note card. Just little bullet points, nothing extensive, just to keep me on track instead of really having to rely on my memory. So it definitely comes in use.
What do you remember about when you first started learning Braille?
I was kind of an odd candidate for learning Braille. I actually started learning Braille at the same time I was learning print, they went hand in hand. So it's something that’s definitely ingrained in my memory permanently. My Mom, when she found out that I was legally blind, insisted upon it, would not take no for an answer. So, from kindergarten all the way up to the 12th grade, I had a braille class every single day. I read novels just it was my kind of downtime, in high school especially. I just go and sit in a room for 45 minutes and read whatever book we were reading at that time just to keep my mind fresh on it because I didn’t use it in the classroom. So that’s really how I learned it.
How old were you when your parents learned that you are legally blind?
I was (oh, goodness) just over a year, old enough to talk but not really old enough to follow any specific directions. My Mom tells a story about how, one day, it was kind of dark in the kitchen and she was saying, “Callie, come over here.” I said, “Oh, but I can't see you.” That just ruined her and that, from that point on, like we went to 14-15 doctors and nobody could really figure out what was going on because I have so much functional daytime vision. It's at night and in dim lighting that it really escapes me.
Has your vision changed over the years or has it pretty much stay the same?
It has changed for the worse. I find that I can't read like the expiration date on a milk carton. It's the most aggravating thing where I've really noticed it that is the expiration dates on things. So, knowing Braille has come in handy, like I said, more for notes in front of classes to get speeches. I'm finding that I'm using it more and more that it's definitely been nice to have as a back-up plan.
Why was your Mom so adamant about you learning Braille along with learning print? I could imagine a lot of parents would just, you know, there's a stigma I'm learning attached to braille. So, so I think your Mom is very forward-thinking, why was she so adamant about it?
She is forward-thinking, she’s a pretty smart lady, and she’s stubborn. Really, my understanding of trying to get a child to be taught braille in the public school system is that you have to be adamant. You have to not take no for an answer and I think that’s really what she did. Fifteen years ago, it was just unheard of for somebody with high partial vision to be taught Braille, and I was lucky enough that I was in a really good school district. She kind of knew the district administrator through some other friends, and so she had some ins…"
Though she had some ins.
What was the hardest thing that you remember about learning Braille?
Oh, I’ve always wished that I had better tracking. The bringing one hand down and getting half, you know, a third of the way through the next line. I’ve never been good at that. The original teacher that I had didn’t instill that in me, so that’s really the hardest thing for me. That little lapse between lines. And the, the more advanced punctuation- the parenthesis and the math especially, all those symbols. It’s hard to keep track of sometimes, especially since I don’t use it every single day.
Looking back now when you think about being taught braille from, it sounds like the earliest ages, what’s your opinion as a young adult now of the way that you were taught as a young child?
I, in retrospect the very first instructor that I had, though he was nice and though we got along, he wasn’t really the best teacher for me. And I think my mom realized that about the seventh or eighth grade and we swapped to a new teacher who- we really started from the get go. But it was harder to learn as a seventh and eighth grader, so though the alphabet and the contractions are forever ingrained in my mind, which I don’t think they would be if I had learned it later in life. Some of it still is- it’s always a little bit iffy, and I always find myself having to kind of, oh yeah that’s what that means with some of the punctuation.
How would you describe the difference between the good teaching that you got growing up and the teaching that could’ve been better? What was it that made the difference?
Drills. The stuff that nobody likes to do. The stuff that as an eighth grader I dreaded going to braille class because I knew this woman was gonna be a drill sergeant and was gonna make me do my slate and stylus, that’s all I had. You know, calluses on my fingers and, but, in retrospect that’s what I needed. Making sure that we didn’t move on to the next level until I, 110 percent had the foundation that I needed. I mean, as an eighth grader who had been taught braille since kindergarten, we were going over the alphabet. We were going back over all the contractions and having immediate recognition and immediate recall, and we weren’t moving on until I had that. And so that was, that was something that I think I really needed.
How many other students were in the school with you who were learning braille?
I was the only one. It was one on one attention from both of the instructors, I was the only blind child, K throught 12, up until I was in the tenth grade.
How did that make you feel?
Um, kind of like the odd person out. I mean, it wasn’t ever really something that I dwelled on, it’s just the way it had always been. You know, I figured that no other blind person had blind kids at their school. And so, but you’re always, you know-I jokingly now say, Oh I’m the blind girl at the party [laughter]. It’s just, you know, that’s who I was and that’s- it wasn’t something that bothered me or that I dwelled on, that was just my identity.
Was there more that you were gonna say? Sorry.
No, no. That’s it.
OK. Today, when you read for pleasure, what kind of material, in terms of content, do you read? And how do you read it? Do you listen to it? Do you read it with Braille? Do you read large print? What’s your method for reading for pleasure?
[laughs] There’s pleasure reading in grad school? When I do find time to read a book just for fun I generally get it through the RFB&D because it is a real person reading the book.
Could you say what that means? You said RFB&D.
The Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic. They’re a- I want to say they’re a non-profit organization and they have volunteers read anything from textbooks to pleasure reading, and then they record it onto CDs, and they have special playback devices that they sell to the public and you can speed up the speech and you can navigate, they have different levels of navigation. And, their CD players actually have a keypad with the twelve standard keys and a few extra other buttons. And you can do all your navigation that way.
So for pleasure, that’s what you like to read?
For pleasure that’s what I, I do, just because it’s a human voice. But for school reading and any other reading that I need to do I use a screen reader. Either Kurzweil, which is a screen reader application or ZoomText has a screen reader application too, so I kind of toggle back ‘cause they have their strengths and weaknesses.
In terms of content, what’s your pleasure reading?"
Oh, goodness, I don’t pleasure read anymore. [laughs]
Okay. When you did.
Comedies, something that is not too deep. I don’t really like the one for the ones where at the end you’re like sobbing hysterically, that’s just not fun for me. The last book I read was about a circus. I mean, just anything, kind of if somebody else says, “Oh, I read this, really a good book,” then just whatever other people are reading and say they like.
So no braille reading for either pleasure or for school.
No, I used to. I used to, in high school, do it in class and kind of push myself to do it at home. They used to send out Goosebumps books in braille. I don't know how I ended up getting the Goosebumps books in braille, but I remember several nights not being able to sleep and not wanting to turn on the light [laughs] and reading my spooky Goosebumps books in braille. But that’s been so long ago.
What’s it like for you in graduate school, what kinds of things do you do to get by, to access your text to complete your assignments, to do the research, those sorts of things? I know that at my school where I teach, in the library, the academic databases don’t have especially accessible interfaces for searching.
I don’t know that I want to use the word “lucky,” but I've been fortunate enough to have a lot of residual vision. So as far as scanning the page, I can pick out the headings and the important stuff that needs to be tagged that often times isn’t. So my ZoomText software, which I can change the contrast on, I use a 2 ½ times magnification and you bump around with your mouse and you can eventually see the whole screen. So, for research, that’s what I use. And then the Kurzweil 1000 for PDF files is character recognition software. Then, ZoomText also has a screen reader application, so if I find an abstract that I want to read through pretty quickly, I can just do some key strokes and click on the first word and it goes.
You're a student at Clemson?
Yes.
I have two questions following up on what you've just said. What is it that you're getting a master’s degree in?
Public administration.
So, are there articles that you get out of JSTOR?
Yes.
Those are often very poorly OCRed. You know, it's a scanned image of a journal that might be 30 years old with very rough OCR behind the image. So, what do you do with text like that?
I can't say that I've run in into enough that I have a protocol for. If it's something that I really, really have to read, I would print it out and I would put it under my CCTV and get the kind of basic idea, because I do have that residual vision.
Is that a device, the CCTV with the camera?
Yes.
Is it a device that you own?
I do. I have one that I got through the Lion’s Club in high school. So, it's mine, nobody can take it from me. [laughs]
[laughs] Does your academic library, which is Clemson, have good assisted-technology resources in the library?
I've been fighting with these people tooth and nail because they don’t have…I don’t know what they have and they don’t know what they have. There's an assisted-technology room that has, I think, a CCTV and some flatbed scanners and some computers that are “accessible,” but you have to have a key. Being that I don’t go to campus very often and that all the library database information is online, I haven’t really found the need to go and really poke around. But when I asked them, “Can we get zoom text in these labs where I like to print?” They're just not willing to do it. So, I can't just go to a computer on campus and make it work.
Without its being a hassle.
Well, I can't, period, and it's endlessly frustrating.
I can imagine. But do you have fellow students at Clemson who also would benefit from assisted-technologies designed to help to fulfill the needs of students with vision like yours or no vision? Are there other students?
I’m sure that there are. None that I know personally, I haven’t been there very long, and when I say, “Can we get zoom text on at least one or two computers around?” Their justification for not getting it is that they don’t think there's a big enough use, that there's not enough high partial students who would utilize it.
Have they done a study?
I'm not sure.
Have they surveyed the students at the school?
No. [laughs]
They don't know really.
They don't know and that's just it. When I ask them what version they have or, what is there. They don't know. They say they'll call somebody. Then two weeks later, I'm like, did you ever call that person? Oh no, no, they didn't know either. So nobody, they are all kind of pointing me in circles. George:That’s got to be frustrating.
I just want to print. I don't really want to do anything. I mean, I paid 12 dollars to print, and I want to print.
You want to print it in a larger font?
No. I just want to print. I just want to be able to, if I have a 20 page paper due, instead of printing it on my personal ink, on my personal paper . . .
I see.
Utilize my 12 dollars.
But their computers don't have the assistive enhancement software that will allow you to get them to print . . .
No.
. . . like you can do on your home computer.
Yes. They tell me that they have Windows Magnifier. I don't know if you guys have played around with that but it's a joke. It's a joke.
That's too bad.
[Laughter] So, that's their thing. We have Magnifier. [laughs] Really?
You were the first student, the first interviewee that is a student in higher education either, undergraduate or graduate. That's why I asked all these questions . . .
Yeah.
. . . about library access. But turning back to our standard set of questions. In terms of literacy, some people say that listening to a book, that, that's not an example of literacy. That you're not literate unless you're reading by sight or through braille. That's what makes a person literate. What's your opinion on the issue?
I agree with those people. I think that you can't learn spelling. You can't learn proper punctuation. You can't learn how words are supposed to flow together properly unless you can read them, either tactually or visually and write them. I know a lot of people who have tried to get into the higher education systems and their writing has suffered so poorly that they don't do as well. Because they've always just taken the audio out. Which is great. I mean, once you get to the point to where you can do it, go for it. But you do need to learn, you know. You don't, you can't learn where a comma goes by sitting in English class. You have to constantly see it and be exposed to it. I agree with those people.
So, the emphasis that you're making, that's interesting is, your writing skills will be very weak if you don't know how to read braille.
If you don't know how to read braille, if you haven't had access to print, yes. If print isn't an option, then you need braille to get those punctuation and those spelling skills. Cause you're not going to get them through an audio book.
So, would you say that there are advantages enjoyed by braille readers that sighted readers miss out on?
You don't have to get up and turn the light on. I can sit here and be looking through an agenda and continue to make eye contact with you. I found that . . . The reason I started utilizing the braille note cards for my public speaking classes, is because I could still scan the room and make “eye contact” with the people in the class and still be getting information from my note cards. It's got some advantages.
Yeah. I'd love to be able to do that.
[Laughter]
Ok. Turning from reading to writing. When you write, and you're in graduate school, so you have to write a lot, I'm assuming.
Yes, yes.
How do you compose? What tools do you use? How do you edit?
I use the same tools that everybody else does. Microsoft Word, and use my ZoomText to proofread, to scan through and make sure. Sometimes I think I have an advantage with my screen reader. And I can read more quickly. People walk in and I'm reading speed and a half from what they'd normally be able to do. I can get through assignments more quickly. Then when I'm proofreading, I might as well have somebody in the room reading my document back to me. So I can tell if a sentence form is right, or if it sounds choppy or not. Sometimes when you're just visually scanning over something, you know how you want it to sound in your head. But it may not really sound that way. So there's some advantages to the assistive technology too, I think.
The voices are getting more and more natural.
Yes.
The first time I heard a screen reader was about ten years ago. Hearing what the Apple VoiceOver system does and you can choose all these different voices, it's amazing.
It is. When they're bad, they're bad. When they're good, they're appreciated. [Laughter]
Obviously, it's going to depend on who your audience is, I was going to ask, do you use a brailler? Do you ever write in braille for an audience of braille readers?
I had a guy that I was dating for a while who lost his vision 18 months prior to us meeting and so he was learning Braille at Louisiana centre for the blindness program run by the National federation of the blind and so even though we talked on the phone, I would write him letters in Braille and send it to him so that he could get some extra practice and in sort of “See spot run” kind of stuff that really was meaningless for him to try to read, it was that added push to really try to decipher what was on the page. And so that’s really probably in the last ten years the only braille that I have composed for another blind person.
And if you are not writing for a blind person, you don’t necessarily need to write in braille?
No.
How would you describe the difference in when you are composing a text for one of your professors in graduate school versus when you are composing a braille text for somebody who is blind. Not that you have done, as you said, a lot of the ladder of those two, what is the difference between the two in creating the text.
You have to be, with the braille writer especially, you have to make sure you know exactly, when I would write this letters I would write them first in a Word document and then transcribe them over because nobody likes scratchy braille where you mess it up and you have to scratch it out.
And then you punch it again.
And then you punch it again, it doesn’t come out as crisp, so you have to be more exact and I think in that way the Word and the technology has made composing that much easier. But there is not a whole lot of difference; I mean what you just figure out what you are going to say and you say it. It’s just another medium for doing it.
When you were a child, were there adult role models who were visually impaired or blind that were there adults with visual impairment or who are blind that you looked up to as role models in your life.
That’s come later, oddly enough, I went to the Lion’s camps and hung out with a bunch of blind kids and they were blind camps of course but nobody really sticks out you know I want to be like that person and that’s come later in life and there wasn’t really anybody that read braille all my sided braille professors didn’t read braille tactically, they read it visually.
Oh wow.
And so, I wasn’t exposed to people reading braille, it was just something that I did, because there was nobody else [laughing].
Do you think that it would be important for young person who is visually impaired to have adult role models like them or would that be important?
It is important, it is important to know people like yourself to, I used to jokingly, when I got older could explain it, going to camps and being with other blind kids, you feel like you are the only purple person in town until you go and hang out and then there is a whole bunch of other purple people and you know you are not the odd bird out anymore, so I think that would be helpful and there is a stigma attached to reading braille and there is stigma attached to using a white cane and if you see other people who you look up to, doing these things, then that’s just icing on the cake, why not?
Is it purple icing?
It’s purple icing.
So you know, as a young adult, as far as you know, are you a role model for young people in your life who are visually impaired or who aren’t visually impaired?
I was a camp counsellor for several years and I like to think that, you know, I had an impact on the kids and the camp system; making sure that they didn’t just get led around everywhere, making sure that we didn’t bring their food and cut up their meat, that they did those things. Just little things like Putt-Putt golfing and a girl didn’t use a cane and didn’t want to use a cane and “Look, at the stairs you can use your golf club to tell what the steps are”, just little stuff like that, “Oh I never thought to do it that way”, and that’s what really blindness is about is learning alternate techniques to doing things, that you just don’t typically think of off the bat.
It seems to be a peer to peer advice that can take place, we have all had something in our lives where somebody goes ‘oh you know if you, I made that recipe once and I found that if you double the sugar, it’s a lot better or if you add more chocolate or,
There is a lot of that.
We all have a story about sitting down using the computer and somebody sits next to you and says ‘why are you are doing it that way, why don’t you just do this’.
Yeah.
And you say ‘wow’. If there’s nobody else in your life who has to deal with the same challenges that you do, you’re not going to have someone to do that sort of peer to peer suggestion work.
Its funny that you say that. I found myself seeking out... “I know that Ed has a dog, so I’ll ask him questions about the dog, and Marty’s really good about computers and I’m having problems with this part.” And its a rush to get to these people because you know they have the answers. It’s a lot more of that in the blind community.
Anything else that you would like to add about braille and braille literacy?
I think we’ve-- The main things I thought were important were the literacy not being listening. I think that’s my main thing.