Braille versus automated reading: a comparative analysis of two assistive technologies through an interactionist perspective

Abstract

ncluding special needs students on the regular teaching system predetermines the mandatory development of oral, reading, and writing abilities as established by the Parâmetros Curriculares Nacionais (Brasil, 1998b) national curriculum parameters for Brazilian schools and reinforced by the Base Nacional Comum Curricular (Brasil, 2017). Among the assistive technologies used by blind students to do reading activities are Braille and screen readers, wich perform automatic reading. This paper aims to verify, through a case study, whether the use of one technology allows for a better understanding of the texts than the other, making it possible for the reader to have an active part in building meanings. To do that, we posed reading questions about four texts – two read in Braille and two by a screen reader – to a blind student enrolled in her fifth year of Brazilian Elementary School in Northwest Paraná and analyzed her answers. This study, of an applied nature, is based on what Menegassi (1995, 2010), Solé (1998), and Koch and Elias (2014) discussthe reading process through a social interactionist perspective of language. The analysis showed that Braille led to a better performance in questions of literal answers, while the screen reader led to better results in understanding textual and extratextual inferences, and personal answers. Despite the differences, we concluded that both technologies must be allied in teaching practices, given that Braille reading prioritizes the decoding stage of texts and screen readers favors the understanding and interpretation stages.