[gui-talk] Sighted "speed reading:" A little perspective

[Joel Deutsch]

First of all, let me say that I'm not a Braille reader. I was curious to try 
learning it just to acquire another blind skill as my vision keeps 
declining. Although I'm still a "partial," as they say, my retinal 
degeneration has already cost me the central vision (macular) photoreceptor 
cells that are necessary to provide the acuity for reading. So I thought 
Braille might come in handy, not that I expected to labor at it for years 
(I'm already 64 and then be able to read articles and books. I knew that 
wasn't either necessary nor realistic. But it sounded neat to be able to 
label household items in Braille or figure out the markings on elevator 
panels and that sort of thing.

I did nicely with the first book of training materials from Hadley, as my 
mental abilities for learning both foreign languages and the symbol system 
of Braille are good enough for such tasks. But as characters were introduced 
where the cell was more densely packed with Braille dots, my fingers simply 
couldn't feel anything but a spot of texture. No matter how hard I 
concentrated, how many hours I struggled, or which finger I tried to use as 
my Braille reading finger. But I gave it the old college try before giving 
up. Just to be clear about where this former print reader is coming from. I 
know at least a little about what Braille is like, and I appreciate what 
uses it has had, and continues to have, for blind people-- in my estimation, 
especially little blind kids, because I think that such intimate engagement 
with written language, in Braille code or of course in print if they weren't 
unable to see it, is what fosters literacy in the very simplest and 
strongest sense. This agrees with one of the important points that Braille 
promoters are quick to make, themselves. So I don't have any prejudices one 
way or the other, except to care deeply about language and understanding it 
as an alphanumeric, grammatical thing, not as oral tradition as if living in 
a Third World tribal village. I mean only from being read to and spoken to.

Sorry if the above may seem digressive to anyone who's read this far, but I 
felt the need to qualify where I'm coming from. I should add that I've been 
a professional writer all my adult life. I've had salaried writing jobs in 
corporate public relations  and instructional writing ("end user" manuals 
for computer systems and computer-driven high-tech manufacturing) to 
journalism, teaching English and ESL in public schools, and editing. Written 
English is something I fell in love with as a child, because it gave my soul 
comfort and my imagination wings from early on. In junior high school, I 
began to realize that the English language itself, its vocabulary, 
grammatical and syntactical structures, and of course reading and writing 
were not only first loves for me but my best talents.

okay. Now, while I can understand, sincerely speaking, why so many 
Braille-literate people who've posted in the Kindle and Braille threads are 
so concerned with questions not only of Braille fluency and reading speed 
compared only within the Braille reading experience, but also with trying to 
compare the efficiency of skillful Braille reading with sighted reading, I 
feel I have to repeat that it's apples and oranges, radically.

Sure, in the sighted world of reading there are faster readers and slower 
readers, just as you'd suspect. But here, the differences are likely to be 
mostly not informed by many of the same factors people are saying divide 
modestly skillful Braille readers from faster and more accurate ones. any 
effort to compare these factors, which I think rarely overlap from one mode 
to the other, would be pretty academic in the dismissive sense. Something 
for a Master's Thesis of some sort, and possibly interesting, but not very 
relevant in reality. In some ways, literacy is helped or hindered across 
this divide between blind and sighted by some similar things, like 
socioeconomics, native intelligence, family support for schoolwork, and the 
like. But so many more factors simply aren't comparable from one to the 
other. As someone on the list has said well and simply, knowing the world, 
including language, by touch is vastly different from knowing it by seeing 
it.

Finally, something I'm not sure is understood, at least from what I keep 
reading in this thread. And that is that at a basic level of sighted 
literacy, reading speed is just not something people think about much. 
Someone who, in adulthood, is really a slow reader, isn't thought to need 
more practice. Almost without exception, the problem is either just being 
slow mentally or, and this can be true without the person seeming "retarded" 
otherwise as it used to be expressed, is that they may have suffered from a 
neurological problem like dyslexia as a child and never overcome it. that's 
when you look at printed words but they tangle themselves up and you can't 
make sense of them, as if they were in a foreign language. I'm 
oversimplifying it, but the main thing is that it isn't an "intellectual" 
problem. it's an actual neurological malfunction.

Then, within the class of people who are generally capable print readers, 
there are some who don't read quickly but mostly because they can't think 
any more quickly and still understand what they're taking in. it goes up 
from there and sort of levels out generally. this has absolutely nothing to 
do with what is known as "speed reading" or with any sort of contest for 
reading speed. Speed reading is a skill that very few people, including the 
most highly literate ones, care anything about. it was popularized as 
something visible in America during the Kennedy years, when for a while 
there was a lot of excited discussion about the idea of efficiency and speed 
as being the qualities a capable person or a capable America could bring to 
the challenge of the Cold War. So those Soviets put up a satellite in space? 
Then American scientists and technicians would do the same, except better, 
and they'd do it quickly, and our pace would not falter, by God. And reading 
(with some factual retention but little sense of the actual language, was 
promoted as being in this competitive spirit. In a way, the fad of speed 
reading as a desirable skill was a precursor to today's ubiquitous use of 
the word "information" to the exclusion, in those who use the term a lot, of 
"knowledge" and "comprehension," which require information to start with and 
then make something out of the accumulated information by thinking and 
putting that information together. it's as if we're encouraging each other 
to be a little less like thinking human beings and more like computers, just 
absorbing information in bits and bytes with our shorter attention spans and 
making quick, immediately useful calculations in order to solve limited, 
narrow problems, which are now so often called "issues" all the time.

but the point is that speed reading and reading contests have about as much 
to do with literacy and verbal intelligence as Indy 500 Formula One racing 
has to do with driving in general, including very skillful driving.

I hope some of this is helpful. Again, Braille reading and sighted reading 
are extremely different experiences, and not really worth comparing. And 
Howe quickly and efficiently someone blind can read in Braille and how 
quickly and comprehendingly someone sighted can read print are just two 
different concerns and, I suggest, not worth pondering about too much.

IMHO, of course.

Joel