helen was blind and deaf. was it passible for to read and write
Answers
Helen Keller came to Perkins when many competing systems for reading and writing for people with blindness were being used, invented and reinvented. These systems included raised-dot alphabets like English Braille, American Braille and New York Point; embossed Roman alphabets, namely Samuel Gridley Howe’s Boston Line Type; and a system that utilized abstracted Roman letter forms called Moon Type.
Although Louis Braille published his tactile writing system in 1829, it wasn’t until 1918 that braille was adopted as the official system in the United States. As a 1904 graduate of Radcliffe College, Keller became the first person who was deafblind to earn a Bachelor’s degree, and she had to read fluently in all of these systems for her studies. In a letter to William Wade written in 1901, Keller remarks: “There is nothing more absurd, I think, than to have five or six different prints for the blind.”
Even though Howe’s Boston Line Type remained the official printing system at Perkins until 1908, braille was so popular for personal use that the school offered braille slates for sale as early as 1869. Slates were metal or wooden grids that fitted over paper and allowed users to form braille dots with a stylus.
By the 1930s, Perkins had designed and manufactured several models of mechanical braille writers. Like other braille writers of the time, the early Perkins models required frequent repair in addition to being noisy and expensive to produce.
When Gabriel Farrell became director of Perkins in 1931, he resolved to develop a superior braille writer that would solve the earlier design problems. Unveiled to the public in 1951, the new Perkins Brailler™ was tough and hard to break, with a touch so light it could be used by young children and those who lacked finger strength. Thanks to the work of director Farrell and designer David Abraham, braille was not only the standard reading and writing system for people with blindness, it was now also easy and fast to produce.