The Need for Assistance in Obtaining Assistive Technology for Children with Visual Impairments

It's sad to share, but I was told repeatedly by people who should have been helping me that Madilyn was “not ready” for a number of assistive technologies that would help her learn and progress in the world at a young age. Maybe I was too naive or too busy thinking about her achieving other goals that I overlooked the important need for Braille reading and writing at the earliest age (maybe even the MOST important need!). Looking back, her exposure to Braille was not enough.

It wasn’t much fun to think of Madilyn sitting at the old clunky heavy metal Perkins Brailler we finally talked the vision consultant into allowing us to borrow. The keys were difficult for her to press, and it was cold and hard. Not at all appealing to a small child. It didn’t make much noise except the movement of the old fashioned gears inside when she managed to press a key or when it 'dinged' at the end of the line. Her fine motor skills weren’t advanced enough for her to independently put in the paper and it often jammed, anyway. She didn’t quite get the idea of the written word even though she loved the alphabet and letter sounds more than anything at the time, except maybe animals! She was often defensive in touching the “bumps” on the paper or in books (she loved to hear stories though), but this didn’t mean she didn’t need to learn about it. She didn’t care to touch soft furry stuffed animals either even though she loved to bark out loud like a dog or meow like a kitty. All in all, I tried to overlook the fact that she wasn’t interested in Braille or reading, and instead focused on her other goals.

So you can probably guess what I think about this now! Why would she have wanted to play with that old clunky boring machine? And all those bumps didn’t make noise when she touched them. It wasn’t that she wasn’t interested in learning, she just wasn’t interested in the way I presented it! If it didn’t make sound, she didn’t care. But I couldn’t afford the $3000+ Mountbatten Brailler that spoke when you pressed the keys nor the $2500+ Refreshable Braille Keyboard for reading audio books with Braille. Guess what? I (like MANY other parents) still can’t just go out and buy these things. But they are things she needs. Assistive technology that exists but is just out of our reach.

Madilyn is just now starting to read Braille words and loves it! She is older now and understands more about the concept of reading but I sincerely believe that it’s because I changed the way it was presented. I did things like added texture pieces to the top of the Brailler keys, sat beside her and said the letter names aloud as she pressed them, and ran her fingers along the Braille words as I read them to her. (I did this one all along but she didn’t always cooperate- it took time for her to accept the hand over hand guidance.) But it’s still not what she needs to achieve in order to have an optimal education (like many of her sighted peers). She could be reading an endless number of books with a refreshable braille keyboard, and I could be printing Braille stickers and coloring pages with a Braille embossing printer. (The one we would really like is $7000 by the way!)

It’s easy to say these things ‘looking back’ but I share them so that maybe you’ll think about your situation a little harder and perhaps expose your blind or low vision child to more Braille than I did. You can’t have too much, but you can definitely have too little!

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