Braille Reading: Factors Affecting Achievement of Dutch Elementary School Children

Abstract

This study compares reading skills of visually impaired children with those of sighted children. It also investigates the relationships between reading achievement and residual vision, hand movement during reading, verbal intelligence, and haptic perception. The blind children took some 2½ times as long as sighted children to read separate unrelated words, though poor braille readers tended to lag farther behind poor sighted readers than good braille readers lagged behind good sighted readers. Amount of residual vision bore little relationship to reading ability, but the way a child moved his or her hand during reading bore a strong relationship. Verbal IQ, as measured on the verbal section of WISC, showed a stronger relationship with reading achievement than did haptic perception. Of the various haptic measures used, form discrimination and figure orientation were more important than size and roughness discrimination.