Only one in 10 blind children learning Braille, report finds.

The New York Times (1/3, MM42, Aviv) reported that “the decline of written language has become a reality for only the blind,” as fewer and fewer visually impaired people learn Braille, many preferring instead to rely upon synthetic voice technology and “computer-screen-reading software.” In fact, “a report released last year by the National Federation of the Blind, an advocacy group with 50,000 members, said that less than 10 percent of the 1.3 million legally blind Americans read Braille.” The report found that while approximately “half of all blind children learned Braille in the 1950s, today that number is as low as one in 10.”