An investigation into the potential of embossed ‘dotted’ Moon as a production method for children using Moon as a route to literacy

Abstract

Dotted Moon is a useful and important resource to complement the range of options available to those teaching and learning Moon. Observation of a variety of Moon readers (including those at early stages of literacy as well as more advanced readers) showed that all participants were able to decode dotted Moon characters and engage in educational activities using dotted Moon at their developmental level and no conclusive evidence was found of any of the participants finding the dotted Moon harder (or easier) to decode than lined Moon. While professionals involved in the teaching of Moon expressed some concern about the potential of dotted Moon, in particular about the quality of some of the characters, there was little evidence to support this from observations made of Moon readers. The technical system used in the project combines an Enabling Technology braille embosser and Duxbury braille translation software. This set-up could be improved further if the software incorporated a Moon font to enable users to more easily edit Moon documents. Other setups available allow the control of spacing and size of the embossed characters, and these are also worthy of further investigation.