Blind Writing Before Braille

Blind Writing Before Braille

Tilly Guthrie delves into the history and development of tactile literacy through this examination of the letters of Victorian writer, Charles Cook.

In May 1859, Charles Cook wrote a letter to the Earl of Derby, seeking an investment in his new small business. He had arrived in Liverpool from India five years previously “for the purpose of learning Music”. Unfortunately, things hadn’t gone to plan; “not being able to render my Music of any practicle [sic] value”, he had turned instead to the “business of a hawker”. Now he only lacked “capital sufficient to procure some tea & coffee” to sell on. What Cook doesn’t mention, but is apparent from the physical form of his letter, is that he was blind. Instead of using ink, the shapes of letters are made up of a series of dots embossed into the paper with pins. This created visually recognisable characters for the sighted recipient of the letter, but in a tactile form that could be legible to the fingertip.  

This letter catches a crucial moment in the history of tactile literacy. Although Braille was invented in the 1820s, it wasn’t taught across Britain until the 1870s, and was not standardised until 1905. Instead, various embossed scripts were developed for blind readers based on the printed Roman alphabet. The aim was integration with the sighted world, but with a failure to acknowledge that the complex shapes of Roman letters were impractically difficult to decipher by touch alone.   

Charles Cook’s letter embodies this approach. He uses embossing stamps made from a block of wood or metal, with protruding pins arranged in the shape of a letter. The character appears backwards on the stamp, and the text written right to left, so that once pressed into the paper it appears the right way around in relief. This technique allowed Cook to write independently, in a script that was legible to the sighted reader who was not familiar with Braille. However, it proved to be a compromise for both parties; the pin-prick letters were difficult to read both by touch and by eye. Further examination of the materiality of this text shows that the downfalls were not merely practical, but affected how a blind writer was perceived in their correspondence.

Even though Cook uses lengthy formal language appropriate for addressing a social superior, mistakes in spelling and spacing become more frequent as this letter progresses. This not only indicates the arduousness of the writing process, but also makes Cook appear careless or unprofessional in his request for investment. Similarly, where corrections are added to the text, they are written in pencil. This has the feel of a teacher correcting a student’s work, especially when the smooth italic handwriting is juxtaposed with the childish letter shapes created by these stamps.

Charles Cook’s letter therefore serves as a case study of a blind person who was clearly aware of formal epistolary conventions, but whose writing inadvertently gives the impression of childishness or perhaps carelessness. Through this kind of material analysis of text, the experience and perceptions of blindness in the Victorian era can be partially uncovered. When faced with the dearth of autonomous disabled voices in the archives, these fragments provide a vital insight into their history.

Further Reading

• Armitage, Thomas Rhodes, The Education and Employment of the Blind: what it has been, is, and ought to be, second edition (London, 1886).
• Golden, Catherine, Posting It: The Victorian Revolution in Letter Writing (Gainesville, 2009).
• Levy, William Hanks, 'Blindness and the Blind' (London, 1872).
• Ott, Katherine, ‘Material Culture, Technology, and the Body in Disability History’, in Michael Rembis, Catherine Kudlick, and Kim E. Nielsen (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Disability History (New York, 2018), pp. 125–39.
• Tilley, Heather, Blindness and Writing: from Wordsworth to Gissing (Cambridge, 2018).

Tilly Guthrie is a PhD researcher at the University of Sheffield, working on the history of blindness and tactile writing in the Nineteenth Century. She is sighted, but an avid appreciator of Braille in all its forms.

by 55151468@ad.mmu.ac.uk

Bringing your Whole Self to Work and the Limits of Assistive Technology

Bringing your Whole Self to Work and the Limits of Assistive Technology

Gabril Hoskin, assistive technology tutor, explores the potential of anthropology to increase accessibility and inclusion.

Late 2022, in an article entitled 'Bringing Your Whole Self to Work', consumer editor and lifestyle journalist Heidi Scrimgeour proposed that assistive technology (AT) opens the door to ensure employees have a voice in an ‘authentic’ workspace. As an AT tutor with a social enterprise supporting university students with disabilities, I see an appetite to create such spaces on a daily basis. It’s not just work colleagues who seek a stake in a credible enterprise: many of my students express a sense of alienation from the university system due to that system’s lack of accessibility. However, I question the extent to which technology can promote inclusion and visibility; the big data called on by tech developers (and, indeed by numerous service providers, universities included) is not sufficient to address the complex needs of disabled ‘users’.

My background is in anthropology, a discipline that leaps on any mention of the ‘A Word’ -Authenticity. What makes something ‘authentic’? Why might people desire this? Are there things and people who are ‘unauthentic’? How are such predicaments expressed in behaviour? In an article exploring ethnography and disability studies, Monica Casper and Heather Talley (2005) suggest that the very category of disability and the potential for inclusion rests on what people perceive as authentic. Posing the question of how disability comes to be viewed as ‘authentic’ or ‘unauthentic’, they highlight a number of studies that suggest that such categories are relational and are constructed by a range of actors, all of whom harbour different cultural identities, be those gender, socio-economic, ethnic or national.

As machine learning and online interaction has become inextricably entwined in ‘everyday behaviour’ (we can see this in choices ranging from smartphone cases to preferences for online dictionary interface) a myriad of these social groups, all involved in the authenticity trade, are now vying for representation and looking to be heard.

In an article that signals new approaches to disability and assistive technology, Smith et al. (2022) note that AT is now recognised as both a means to and an end in itself in the achievement of rights of persons with disabilities. Both the WHO and UNICEF encourage action to increase global access to AT. Concurrently, the service sector’s pursuit of the experiences and meaningful interactions of its customers as an antidote to the quantitative data generated by machine learning has picked up pace.

What is perceived as ‘authentic’ and the way in which such authenticity is negotiated among users have come centre stage in this debate. The focus of disability service providers is slowly shifting to accommodate the reality that, if we are truly customer focused, looking to increase accessibility and amplify the voices of persons with disabilities, we need to engage with this debate. My hope and belief is that the methods employed by anthropologists to explore ‘other people’s worlds’ are going to lead the way.

Gabril Hoskin is an assistive technology and study skills tutor with Assistive Solutions, a London-based social enterprise. His background is in ethnomusicology and his research interests include: cultural diversity, disability, popular music and migration.

by 55151468@ad.mmu.ac.uk