The Effect of Orientation on Braille Recognition in Persons who are Sighted and Blind

Morton A. Heller, Jeffrey A. Calcaterra, Shavonda Green, and Francisco Jose de Lima Earlier research (Heller, 1985, 1987, 1989, 1992, 1993) found large effects of orientation on the recognizability of tangible patterns and braille by people who are blind and those who are sighted. The subjects who were congenitally blind had difficulty coping with tilt when numbers were drawn on their palms (Heller, 1989), but this difficulty could have been related to their lack of familiarity with the patterns. Orientation is also relevant to learning to use an Optacon, since the absence of spatial reference information could impede learning (see Millar, 1997). The effects of orientation are not specific to touch because the recognition of visual patterns is also affected by orientation (Heller, 1992; Millar, 1997). In these studies, the performance of the subjects who were blind was lower when the braille characters were tilted by +45 and +90 degrees, and the performance of the subjects who were congenitally blind was slightly lower than that of the other subjects (those who were late blind and those who were sighted) (Heller, 1992). The effect of visual status was nonsignificant, but phenomenological reports differed for those