Examining a Novel Response Modality: Teaching Sighted Individuals to Read Braille Visually

Abstract

In order to prepare teachers to instruct children with visual impairments in braille, previous research has taught sighted adults to match braille sample stimuli to print comparisons in a matching-to-sample (MTS) format and has assessed the emergence of other braille repertoires such as transcribing and reading following this training. Although participants have learned to match-to-sample with braille, they displayed limited emergence of other braille repertoires. This lack of generative responding may have resulted from participants’ over-selective attending to components of compound braille characters during instruction. The current study taught three undergraduate learners to construct braille characters given a print sample—which required attending to each individual braille symbol—and again assessed generative braille responding. All participants met mastery of 378 braille construction responses and demonstrated superior generative responding across tests of transcribing braille than shown in previous research.