Wednesday, March 9, 1932
I hate Braille.
I don’t know what’s worse, learning to write it or learning to read it.
Writing Braille is an excruciatingly tedious process. You have to put your paper in between your Braille slate, which is a two-piece metal frame. Like a sandwich. The Braille slate has row after row of little windows and even littler coves inside each window, which is where you place your stylus. The stylus looks like a miniature ice pick only it’s blunt and has a knobby top that you grasp in your palm and push down on to make the raised dots on the paper.
If you don’t make sure the stylus is precisely where you want it before you push down, you’ll have no idea what you’re writing.
It takes hours just to punch one sentence.
And that’s not all!
You have to write from right to left because the raised dots come out on the other side of the paper (which is where you actually do the reading). You can’t see where the dot is unless you take the paper out of the frame and turn it over, which is just too much trouble, if you ask me.
And reading Braille is just as hard.
Because I’m a beginner I’m working with the dots that are bigger than the regular one. Even with the big dots, I can’t tell one letter from another. I’ll never be able to read the teeny, tiny dots Amanda and Eva are reading. They’re simply too small and too close together and no matter how many times I go over them I can’t tell them apart.
Amanda says I should put Vaseline on my hands and sleep with gloves on. That will soften my fingers and make them more sensitive. Maybe so, but I have enough to do getting ready for bed each night without adding Vaseline and gloves to my list.
