I know I mentioned Nick learning Braille in After Gravesen, but I was reading another story with a blind character that went into more depth about it and I learned a lot about how complex it is. This story could use some chapters not about Sarah Rogers or Winnifred Barnes, so I thought this was the perfect opportunity for a little Jackie Fury content.
The Summer of Dots:
Going into this, Jackie worried that the hardest part would be learning to navigate. She constantly worried about Nick getting lost or running into something and getting hurt. In the weeks after his surgery, there was a steep learning curve. He banged his shins into a lot of furniture, hit his head on things, and rarely dared venture more than an arm's length from the walls of their apartment, but he quickly adapted. As it turned out, hearing and touch were nearly as useful for getting around as vision. By the end of the summer, he never used the cane in the apartment.
The hardest, most frustrating part—for her and for Nick—was actually Braille. When Nick had recovered from the surgery, Jackie didn't waste time getting him enrolled in a course in the hopes that he'd be able to read fluently by the time he started school in the fall. When she asked his instructor if he thought that was possible, the look in his eyes told her everything. "Braille is much more than twenty-six combinations of dots representing letters," he explained. "There is a vast shorthand."
"How vast?" Nick asked.
"Over one hundred eighty contractions in addition to the twenty-six letters, punctuation, and various other symbols. That, and it takes a long time to train the fingertips to be sensitive enough to the dots to actually read them."
Neither Jackie nor Nick expected to hear such daunting news. Nick, however, got over his shock much more quickly than she did. "So, I definitely won't start eighth grade at an eighth grade reading level," he said matter-of-factly.
"Probably not. With enough hard work, you should be able to read uncontracted Braille by the time you enter school. Learning all the contractions will probably take you a bit longer."
"Let's get started."
Jackie admired his no-nonsense attitude. Her brain was still stuck on one hundred eighty contractions. Shaking off the terrifying notion of having to learn all those, she focused on what the instructor, Mr. Fairley, was telling Nick. Strangely, he pulled out a small muffin tin and a bucket of tennis balls. "Braille is composed of cells; each cell has six dots in two rows like this." He guided Nick's hand to the muffin tin and let him feel the empty dots, two vertical rows of three. "The dots are numbered like this: left row top to bottom is one, two, and three. The right row is four, five six."
"Why aren't they read left to right?"
Mr. Fairley chuckled. "Because Louis Braille deemed it so."
Nick scowled. "Sounds legit."
"When you invent an alphabet, you get to choose how it's numbered. So, feel the cell and tell me which dot is which."
Nick ran his hand down the left side and read off, "One, two, three." Then the right. "Four, five, six."
"Excellent. Now, letters and such are made by having raised dots in the six spots of the cell. For example, a letter A is a single dot in the one position."
Without being asked, Nick found the bucket of tennis balls and dropped one into the number one position in the muffin tin.
"That's perfect. Now a letter B is dots one and two."
Nick added another tennis ball. They went through the entire alphabet over the next twenty minutes. Jackie watched in fascination as Nick rearranged the tennis balls to create the different letters.
"Great!" Mr. Fairley commended. "Now that you know the basics, I'm giving you homework."
"So much for summer break," Nick grumbled.
"Be polite," Jackie chided.
"No, it's fine," Mr. Fairley assured. "A sense of humor always comes in handy."
"I'll say."
"Anyway, you have two homework assignments. The first is to practice the combinations for all the letters. Mom, do you have anything at home you can use?"
"Yes." They had a bigger muffin tin, but she could easily block off all but six of the cups.
"Secondly, I'm going to give you a tactile practice book. It has lots of different exercises to help train your fingers to recognize the dots and their patterns. It comes with an audiotape of instructions, or your mom can read the printed instructions for you."
"Sounds good." Jackie wasn't sure she would have time to help Nick with his Braille, but she could always let Jake read the instructions for him. Or Dawn, to give her practice with reading too and kill two birds with one stone.
~0~
Nick memorized the letter configurations with relative ease, but the tactile practice booklet frustrated him to no end. Jackie had seen the exercises and could only imagine how difficult they were. She had a hard enough time figuring it out by looking at the dots, and Nick couldn't even do that—he could only feel them. He'd sit at his desk or the kitchen table for an hour or two every day, fingers scanning over the pages. The booklet Mr. Fairley had given him got progressively harder as it went on. Nick had always been the type of kid to dislike doing anything he didn't immediately succeed in. Though reading with his fingertips was so foreign that there was no way he could possibly be good at it so soon, Jackie could tell he expected better from himself.
"Why can't I just rely on audiobooks for the rest of my life?" he asked with a grumble after he failed for the third time to correctly identify the cell that was different in each of the rows.
"Because not everything is available in audio form. Public restrooms and classrooms and things like that are labeled in contracted Braille."
"I can probably tell which one is the men's room by smell."
"I'm sure you could. But this will allow you to read much faster than audiobook. You'll be able to do your homework faster."
Nick sighed despondently, but he tried again. This time he got it right. The success helped renew his efforts to some degree, and he finished his homework for the day in only ten minutes more. Jackie paused her work on dinner to check on Dawn and Jake in the living room. They had broken open Nick's Tack Tile box and were playing with them like building blocks.
"Hey. Those are not toys," she scolded. Mr. Fairley sent Nick home with the Tack Tiles to practice; they were bricks with Braille on them, much like the blocks with print letters that most young children played with. Nick used them to increase his familiarity with the different cell configurations and which letters they corresponded to.
"But they're colorful and buildable," Jake countered, gesturing to his tower of Tack Tiles.
"Not. A. Toy. Put them away." She also didn't want them in the Tack Tiles because Nick organized them himself; he wouldn't be happy having to feel all the tiles for the one he wanted.
"Did they get into the Tack Tiles again?" Nick called from the other room.
"Yes!" Dawn said. "You're not very good at hiding them."
"I shouldn't have to." Nick walked into the room and waited for them to finish putting them all away. He took the box of Tack Tiles and put it back in his and Jake's room. "Don't touch my Tack Tiles again. You have plenty of your own shit to play with."
"Language!"
"Sorry, Mom."
Jackie shook her head. It was hard to be mad at him when he was constantly working so hard to adjust to this new lifestyle. The stress and the grief were bound to come out sometimes, and as far as she was concerned, swearing was the least destructive way for them to do so.
~0~
Once Nick proved to Mr. Fairley that he'd mastered the alphabet, he moved on to the first set of contractions. They came in several different kinds. First, there were letters that, when alone, stood for entire words, like B for "but" or T for "that". There were also unique cells that stood for full words. For example, dots two, three, four, and six meant "the." A full cell (all six dots) stood for the word "for." There were also cells that indicated something about the cell next to them, such as whether it was a capital letter or a number. Numbers were the same cells as letters A through J, but the only way to identify them as numbers was to have a cell with dots three, four, five, and six before it.
From there it only got more complicated. There were cells that meant one thing if in the middle of a word but something else if at the beginning or by themselves. Often, two cells were needed to identify things such as brackets, underlining, bullet points, bold, and math symbols. Initial-letter contractions were a special cell (either a dot five; four and five; or four, five, and six) followed by a letter, and that stood for an entire word. A four and six or a five and six followed by a specific cell represented a combination of letters often found at the end of a word such as "ound," "sion," or "less." On top of that, many words were always written as abbreviations, such as "almost" being cut down to "alm" or "himself" to "hmf."
Jackie knew about all of these contractions because Mr. Fairley gave her a cheat sheet. But it was printed in ink—not accessible to Nick. Even if he gave them one in Braille, Nick wasn't good enough at reading it to get much use out of the cheat sheet anyway. Jackie was grateful that Mr. Fairley knew how to divvy up teaching all the different contractions. She wouldn't even know where to start.
Nick's homework for that week was to work on memorizing the single letters that stood for words. Some of them were easier because the letter was the first letter of the word and it provided a major hint, but others were random. An X by itself meant "it" and a Z meant "as."
"Why does a K stand for knowledge?" he asked. "I feel like that word isn't used commonly enough to require an abbreviation."
"Can you think of a K word that's used more often?" Jackie countered.
"Knife. Kite. Kangaroo. Koala. Kowabunga."
"I don't know about that last one."
"Still seems weird."
"Maybe Louis Braille used it often enough for it to earn an abbreviation."
"I guess so. What's a C by itself again?"
Jackie checked the cheat sheet. "Can."
"Thanks."
"I wanna learn to read the dots too!" Dawn requested. The more she saw Nick working on them, the more she wanted in on the activity.
"Dawn, you don't need to know Braille. You have eyes," Nick said.
"So did you when you were my age. Things can change," she countered. Jackie decidedly did not like this direction of conversation. Jake and Dawn both tested negative for the gene that predisposed Nick to retinoblastoma, but she still worried every day that one of her other two children would fall ill.
"Hopefully they won't," she stated. "Dawn, you should practice reading print. Maybe when you've mastered that you can learn Braille."
"How will you know I've mastered it?"
"When you can read Great Expectations."
"What's that?"
"A boring old British book," Nick informed her. "If that's Mom's benchmark, I'd put off mastering reading for as long as I can."
~0~
By the end of the summer, Nick's tactile sensitivity was acute enough to read Braille, but it took him a long time and he often had to restart a line to reorient himself to the divisions between cells. When Jackie ran her fingers over the lines of text, she could feel that there were dots, but she didn't have a hope of identifying the individual letters, especially since there were no borders between cells. Nick had to rely on sensing the distance between dots to know whether they were part of the same cell or two separate ones. The difference was imperceptible to the average sighted person, but he'd worked hard to train his hands and brain to see the distinction. Jackie rescheduled his lessons with Mr. Fairley to work around his school schedule so he could keep advancing his Braille skills while also remaining on track with his peers in school. She worried that he'd fall behind because of his reduced literacy, but the school faculty on his IEP team and Nick assured her that he wouldn't. Besides, he had Matt to keep him company and help him along. His goal for the school year was to read fluently by the next summer, so he'd be prepared for high school. Jackie didn't doubt him for a second.
