Below is the transcript of this interview
Interview with Laura
Andrew: Hi everybody. Welcome along to an event for Bookshop 507 and Braille House. Today we are joined by a Mother of one of our library members Laura – Welcome – Thank you for joining us.
Laura: Hi Andrew. Thank you for having me.
Andrew: A pleasure. So can you tell us a bit about yourself.
Laura: Well I am Mum to Eva who is eight and a half years old and Eva has cortical visual impairment. So Eva lost her vision at the age of one through viral encephalitis so from there we had a whole new world of exploring the world of vision impairment I guess and that’s what bought us here to start getting involved with Eva learning Braille and just becoming part of a mainstream community but in a slightly different way.
Andrew: Yeh right. And how did you find Braille House?
Laura: Actually we – Eva was taking part in the Braille Literacy Challenge ..
Andrew: Oh fantastic
Laura: We live on the sunshine coast and Eva attends Chancellor State Collage and they are a Queensland accredited school for children with vision impairment and part of the program was every year they took their vision impaired students down to Braille House for the Literacy Challenge. So our first exposure was when Eva was five and we came down and Eva was part of the Fun group so not in the big competitive group like the big kids and she thought it was just the best thing ever to be around other kids like herself and that’s when she started to get her exposure to Braille.
Andrew: Yeh. I think it is very important that kids like Eva do find other kids like them. It’s a good support group and a lot of the people from the Braille Challenge actually become friends – life long friends as well.
Laura: Yeh and Eva is at the age where she’s questioning “why am I different’ and “I just want to fit in” and “I want to be able to read this and that” and so going to the Braille Literacy Challenge really helps her connect like you said with kids such as herself and she has made some lovely friends and we see every year and they catch up and “have you met this and what have you been doing” and it’s all cute to see that and even friends that when she was attending a play group at Narbethong she has caught up with them because they have all gone through the schooling system at different schools and she’s got to see them after so many years being away from each other. So it is a really great support network there.
Andrew: Yeh – nice one. And how has Braille helped Eva?
Laura: Wow – it has really opened up a whole new world. So obviously a child with a vision impairment, one of the big things is how are they going to get exposed to literacy, how are they going to keep up with the school curriculum, how are they going to keep up with a social setting talking with their friends and making that connection with things such as books. So when we started Prep there was a teacher there really pushing her to learn Braille just at the same time as her peers were learning to read and write. It was all through sight words and doing the old six egg carton and putting ping pong balls in for the letters so we all did that together and picked it up within a Term. Eva knew the alphabet and reading was little bit more challenging because knowing things like the “I” and the “e” is very similar and so she would get herself confused. So there was probably a year or two where she struggled with that and then suddenly it just clicked and then everything suddenly just went off and she just started to read everything. So I had to learn Braille and I had to type and translate Braille books for her – this was before we had a Mountbatten. So I had to on the Perkins try and learn how to Braille Possum Magic and all these other authors she loved. So really simple books because my Braille skills are very very slow. So everything just went crazy from there and it has helped her keep up with her peers. You know learning is eighty to eighty-five percent visual and she is on par with her rest of the students in the grade which is fantastic and that’s through the Braille, through the reading, writing, through the mathematics she’s got to learn and she has been able to keep up with that because of that constant exposure that we have had to Braille.
Andrew: Yeh – Right, and I think that the really important thing is to learn at the same level as your peers is really important. So what sort of opportunities do you think Braille is providing Eva. So obviously there is the opportunity to learn at the same pace as her peers but having access to more material that gives her an idea socially as well like if Harry Potter is popular she can discuss that with her friends as well. What are some of the other opportunities do you think Braille has afforded her?
Laura: And I don’t think you can discount the fact that her being able to learn alongside her peers, for an eight year old, it’s a big thing. You know they want to fit in, they want to be like their friends, they want to do everything like their friends, so for her to be able to sit in a reading group every Tuesday morning she goes into her reading and writing groups and the school brailles, usually a short story the same that the rest of her group is reading and they all have to read passages from it and then they do comprehension assessments from it and they have to go back and answer questions, that in itself is just huge for Eva because when she got given that book last year to her first reading group she felt so independent, and she wanted to go herself to the reading group and she put her hand up to answer the questions and she would be so excited that she would be part of something that she didn’t need that help, she didn’t need that teacher’s aide to read it to her – she didn’t need that audio – she could read it just like everybody else – that in itself has been monumental. You know going, you know being able to read signs now that Eva is fully proficient in Braille and in most of her contractions, going into a lift and saying “I want to press the button – let me see – what level are we going to” and we point things out to her and say “there’s a braille sign Eva” and she will go and read it. We went overseas last year, we went across Europe and we found at Trafalgar Square in London they have a sign in Braille and she got to read it out to us and at the Louvre they have a room, a tactile room and you could feel the size of the Louvre and the statue of Napoleon and she got to read all those things. That was just huge for her that she of the adventure not us just explaining to her but her reading it as well so just that inclusion that inclusion is the biggest thing for her.
Andrew: Yeh – we find that as well when we do particularly braille menus for restaurants and cafes .
Laura: that’s a huge one and I wish more of them had them. The Hogs Breath Café in Mooloolaba, they have a menu and we only discovered it when we went a year ago and I think we saw it on your site, and I thought I’d better ask them when we go and they pulled it out for her and she said “I have my own menu and do you know they have this and this” because we don’t read to her what’s in the adult’s menu we just read to her what is in the kid’s menu. She was reading the whole menu and she was amazed at the variety of food and said “why can’t I get this” – “sure”. So I wish more cafes and restaurants had braille menus because it just opens up a world for them.
Andrew: Yeh and I think that then they – pretty much having stuff read at them if they don’t have that opportunity to read it themselves. So what does Eva want to be when she grows up?
Laura: Eva wants to be a Chef.
Andrew: Right – it’s important for her to read menus.
Laura: You are right. We borrowed some of the cookbooks from Braille House – I think we got Jamie’s fifteen minute meals and there was vegetarian cookbook and she was going through it and reading out the ingredients and that was really fun for her. Because she is so tactile we are always in the kitchen as well so we are showing her the baking and you are learning mathematics – what’s a quarter cup what’s a half a cup and all these different methods of doing things – how to mix up properly. She spends a lot of time with my mum in the kitchen they make pancakes and they make Spanish Churros and Mum is teaching her how to beat it properly and she wants to be a Chef – she definitely has her sights set on it so watch out.
Andrew: All the best and it’s good that we can have I think, we do have such a range at Braille House. So yes we have Harry Potter and we have the classics but we also have crossword books that people can get and recipes and that sort of thing. I think that any text should be available in Braille as well so we really try and have a broad range of that so people can experience all forms of it. And does Eva have a favourite book?
Laura: Eva is currently obsessed with Harry Potter so we have been trying to get her to read something like Harry Potter for a while because there was a lot of short stories and she was saying she wanted something bigger so I logged into the Braille House Library catalogue and I found that you did have Harry Potter and we actually came across Harry Potter a few years ago when we first visited Braille House for the Braille Literacy Challenge we got a tour of your Library down stairs and we were just standing there, I was in awe with the amount of books and I saw the Harry Potters and I think one of them had thirteen volumes and they were saying “here’s Harry Potter and it’s just thirteen volumes” and I just thought oh my that is huge and it’s always been at the back of my mind so we finally convinced Eva to read it and Oh Wow she’s obsessed, we’ve actually got, I’ve got next to me all the Harry Potter Legos and she is just so obsessed with Harry Potter she is up to I think she is up to The Order of the Phoenix and the postman knows us really well, he drops the bags over the fence and she’s just screaming for joy when she gets the next one. We are up to the last volume she is “can you please email Braille House Library I need the next set – contact them, please make sure you contact them – they only send them on Friday and we get them on Monday so I don’t want to wait a whole week” and I’m “OK, I’ve got it” so she is just clued in and that in itself being able to read Harry Potter and talking about it with her friends is just huge and Harry Potter is also a book for adults, her PE teacher reads it, there’s another teacher in another grade who has outfitted his whole classroom with Harry Potter, and she gets to have these conversations with everybody throughout the day about Harry Potter and where they are up to and that has just been so wonderful to have that experience of being involved in a world that is not your own. Reading was a big thing for me when I was a kid and I’m so happy she has that exposure and is able to tuck herself away for a few hours and read quietly. We do catch her sometimes at five a m reading and late into the night so we have had to stop her and one of her teachers has said they have had to tell her to stop reading when they were in a classroom because we were trying to get onto other tasks so it’s a good problem to have. But you know her vocabulary has expanded which is fantastic because she has low vision we get to understand now more of exactly what she needs, what she is looking at and what is fuzzy and what’s not so it’s not just exposure to another world and creativity it’s just also the expansion of your vocabulary.
Andrew: Do you think people generally understand the importance of reading and writing or literacy or do people just take it for granted unless it is someone with a visual impairment and needs Braille.
Laura: I think in our culture, the Australian culture, we do understand the importance of Literacy and I say that because we were speaking to an overseas specialist and they said they hadn’t come across a child such as Eva that has cortical vision impairment and that can read Braille that most of their students learn by audio and I could not understand that until I realised that most of these people grow up I think with a certain level of illiteracy and that really surprised me but that seems to be the norm in that culture. So in the Australian culture we are very aware of the importance of literacy and it was right when Eva was four years old and attending a playgroup at Narbethong Special School that they would say to me that Literacy was the most important thing you will need to focus on with Eva and she needs to be exposed to Braille at an early age. And we are very well aware of it and it is when you start talking to people that they realise there is not a lot of Braille out there in terms of books. You know we rely on Braille House a lot because we can’t find books anywhere else. And it’s when you are talking to relatives when they say “I want to get Eva a book for her birthday or Christmas, where can I look”. Well here’s the problem you know. You have to get them from the US which takes eight to twelve weeks of shipping or that’s probably about it and they are so expensive so that’s when thankfully with Braille House it’s “we are going to get those twelve volumes, we are going to read them, we’re going to send them back and we’re going to get more” and it’s just a constant rollover of books which is absolutely amazing and when I do tell people about it they say you are really lucky to have that and we are super lucky because Eva is such an avid reader it’s now open to the Library.
Andrew: Culturally we do want everybody to succeed, we want everybody to have the same opportunities and that only comes from Braille for literacy. That must be difficult in other cultures for them to reconcile that like we know they are going to have less opportunities but that’s OK.
Laura: Exactly. Exactly. And that’s a huge problem in itself in that people, you know you have people say “that’s amazing that she can read” and I go “Why. Why. Why is it amazing that she can read.” We should all have the same exposure to everything whether you have a vision impairment or a hearing impairment or you have cerebral palsy. Everyone should be allowed to have access to things. It’s funny you know that with our network it has opened up a lot of these things, a lot of these thoughts for our extended friends and family “you know you are right – why can’t she do that”.
Andrew: and I guess that it’s people being exposed to it. I mean if people haven’t been exposed to it I think a lot of people stop and go “yeh, if my child had a visual impairment I would want them to have every opportunity to succeed if they can and if that includes Braille or what ever it is then you just do it”.
Laura: Yep that’ exactly right.
Andrew: Yes. So looking forward we have missed the Braille Challenge this year. Next year the Braille Challenge will be back bigger and better than ever. And just, has Eva used an ebraille refreshable braille device?
Laura: No. so we are still on the Mountbatten and I believe, I don’t know maybe at the end of next year their going to start getting her onto the refreshable braille device because she still isn’t fluent in the Mountbatten I believe. At our school what they like to do is get you well versed on the Perkins, then from the Perkins move onto the Mountbatten; be very well versed on the Mountbatten because it’s a jump in technology from the Mountbatten to something like the refreshable braille device and I think they want to take baby steps.
Andrew: Yeh. I think that is like everything really. You start to write with pen and paper before you get introduced to .. yeh I think it is really important to establish that. So is there anything else you want people to know or hear or any thoughts that you have?
Laura: Oh look I just think people should know the importance of having something like a Braille House in the community, exposure to books and even like you said wider services like doing menus in restaurants and cafes. I don’t think many people know that. A little thing like that is so important for children and adults – there are so many vision impaired adults in the community as well. That kind of support is amazing and even things like the Braille literacy challenge, to be able to bring kids together has just been so wonderful and we are pretty disappointed we missed this year. We missed last year as well but just that community support you have across Queensland has really been beneficial for our family. So thank you for everything you do for Eva all the time with the Harry Potter books.
Andrew: We will make sure we keep them coming and we will see if JK Rowling can write a couple more. Excellent. Thank you so much for joining us today and sharing some of your stories and insights and we wish Eva and yourself all the best and thank you for joining us. Have a good day.
Laura: Thank you Andrew. Have a great day.
