Perkins student wins gold at regional Braille Challenge

Mar. 20—Perkins ninth-grader Piper Conner arranged her Braille paper and "Brailler" on the table, waiting for the competition to start.

"I was nervous, but when I actually got into the testing room, the nerves kind of went away, because I think I was like, ready, and I knew what was coming," Conner said.

Conner, 15, won gold in the Freshman Transition ninth-grade category in a recent Braille Challenge at the Oklahoma School for the Blind in Muskogee.

Conner, who competed against five other contestants in her category, was one of 33 students who competed in the Braille Challenge at the school.

The Oklahoma Regional Braille Challenge is part of the national Braille Challenge hosted by the Braille Institute of America.

OSB, part of the Oklahoma Department of Rehabilitation Services, participated March 6 in one of more than 50 regional Braille challenges across the United States, Canada and Great Britain.

The preliminary regional contest allows contestants to compete at their regional level in areas of Braille literacy. The top 10 students from the U.S., Canada and Great Britain, who competed at age and grade level in regionals, are eligible for the Braille Challenge Finals held in Los Angeles in June.

Oklahoma Regional Braille Challenge Coordinator Faye Miller, who's worked with the competition for 22 years, said there were five categories in which to compete. In addition, each category had a transition category, which was a category for Braille competitors not reading at grade level (or not blind at birth).

Competing the Braille wayTools used by contestants included the Brailler, a kind of typewriter made specifically for writing Braille. The Brailler has nine buttons representing the alphabet, a backspace button, a space bar and an "enter" button. It also has a "slider" button to position the cursor.

Conner used Braille paper — thick like parchment paper — in the competition.

Some contestants in other rooms also used a book player — listening to an audio book being read and typing the words on their Brailler.

The contestants met with volunteers first and divided into testing rooms for their competition. Miller said the day's events lasted most of the day, including the time it took to grade the work and hand out awards.

Conner competed in spelling, reading comprehension and proofreading.

"After I heard that I placed first place and got gold, I was surprised — because I had gotten a little bit nervous and anxious earlier in the day ... I felt I didn't do as well," Conner told the News Press.

Conner said she had been practicing for the Braille Challenge for weeks.

"We have 45 words that we have to spell in 20 minutes," Conner said. "You can type them un-contracted or contracted, which means either letter by letter or using the contractions, which basically just make Braille shorter so it's not so long to read."

Miller, an orientation mobility specialist at OSB for 25 years, explained that a word such as "and" spelled un-contracted means the contestant would spell it just the way it's written. But spelling the word in contracted Braille means the contestant would use one cell, or letters representing "and."

"Cells are made up of a maximum of six dots in different combinations," Miller said.

To read in Braille, the student moves an index finger across a series of raised dots on a page or surface. The letters of the alphabet and every number are represented by a 2x3 grid, or three rows and two columns.

In proofreading, Conner had to look for mistakes in spelling, grammar, punctuation and in Braille.

"A Braille mistake (is) a word that needed to be contracted but wasn't contracted, or one of the Braille cells that is maybe written backwards," Miller said.

It could also be the misuse of a contraction, Conner said.

The difficulty in reading Braille depends on the experience of the student who is reading, and how often they use Braille within their day, Miller said.

Every step in the testing process was read aloud to the contestants, in addition to the rules for each part of the competition, before they took the tests.

Braille Challenge is set up to accommodate readers at any level. If a competitor isn't competing on grade level, the freshman test is designed for the third- and fourth-grade level.

"That's about at her Braille level, not her regular academic level, but the level where she's successful in reading Braille," Miller said. "(Her competitors) are all students who will have similar situations to (Conner's)."

For Conner, competing on grade level wasn't possible because she's only been learning Braille the past several years. When she first began learning Braille, it was hard to feel small details in the raised dots of the alphabet.

"It was challenging because I would be rubbing my finger on it and trying to read it, but I couldn't figure out the difference between the letters until my fingers got used to feeling for the difference," Conner said.

It was not only learning letters of the alphabet and simple basics about Braille, but learning how to read Braille more efficiently.

Some students use a method called "scrubbing," where students move the soft area at the tip of their index finger up and down instead of side to side, which Conner said wasn't as effective.

Students involved in other activities, such as guitar playing that might harden the index finger, have to use other fingers or their non-dominant hand.

'Only competition of its kind'Reading levels in Braille are the same for print reading, but Miller said OSB elects to have students learn Braille if they have a degenerative eye disease, or if their print reading is inefficient or causes them a lot of eye strain.

"We encourage those students and their parents to start learning Braille, so they may not start learning Braille until they're older and they already have print literacy skills but their Braille skills are not commiserate with their grade level," she said.

Learning Braille is very individualized for each student, Miller said.

"Blindness, in general, people think of it as being completely, totally blind, but there's such a range of visual impairments and a range of the way that our students use their vision functionally," Miller said.

She said these factors present a challenge for contests such as the Braille Challenge, as coordinators try to put students in categories where they'll be successful and yet competitive.

"Braille Challenge is the only competition of its kind that the students can really showcase their Braille skills," Miller said. "Braille Challenge is not just important for those students, but with stories like this, it brings community awareness and it also involves the community."

Miller said their volunteers come every year from across the state to help with the competition, and more volunteers are needed.

Learn more about the Braille Challenge at brailleinstitute.org/braille-challenge/.