Sure, I learned Braille because I work on assistive technology. There's no comparison in difficulty - ASL and other sign language variants are completely unique languages with their own vocabulary, syntax, and grammar. Braille is just a way to write letters.

Learn 26 letters and 5 symbols and you can write "grade 1" Braille messages. Learn a few dozen "grade 2" contractions and you can read 99% of Braille signs.

Of course, learning to feel Braille with your fingers takes more time, but it's just practice. As a sighted person you can read by seeing the dots if you want to.

A lot of people who lose their sight later in life never learn Braille, but studies find that learning Braille is highly correlated with blind people finding employment and a successful career.

"Fewer than 10 percent of the 1.3 million people who are legally blind in the United States are Braille readers. Further, a mere 10 percent of blind children are learning it. "

From this report:
https://www.nfb.org/images/nfb/documents/pdf/braille_literacy_report_web.pdf

Sighted here.

I learnt braille because I write a lot of letters and one of my keen interests is cryptography.

I send out letters to penpals in obscure formats (occasionally coded braille) and receive them too.

I can only read grade I with my fingers, if I'm reading II then I'll look at the page.

So yeah, I learnt braille for shits and giggles and it has not come in handy once yet.

I am a sighted parent currently learning braille. I have already learned grade 1 braille, but am very slow at reading it. I will learn grade 2 braille next.

My visually impaired daughter is 4 and is learning to read braille and print. We believe braille literacy will be important for her success in the future and I figured the best way support and help her would be to learn braille myself.

I’m legally blind and learning braille atm because my retina is dying at an alarming rate. I have a braille teacher but honestly you could most likely do it yourself if it’s just for fun and not an actual thing you’ll need to use. I generally think that’s a good thing to keep in mind. Lesrning Braille isn’t just a cool party trick, for some people it’s a really hard sad truth.

Hello! I am sighted and know braille because I am a teacher of the visually impaired (TVI). People who are sighted generally read braille by sight, rather than by touch - a huge misconception is that those of us with sight read tactually, but by and large we do not. And that actually goes into another one of your questions. Adults who lose their vision have a harder time reading braille because finger sensitivity is kind of a learned thing. Our brains are plastic, but they are the most plastic when we’re little- so our capacity to do something like play an instrument, learn a language, or discriminate braille is going to be the best when we’re young. An adult who is learning braille can do it...eventually. Someone sighted? Virtually impossible. So if we look at the causes of blindness, a lot of that is acquired blindness- diabetic retinopathy, macular degeneration, age-related glaucoma, etc- and that explains why many adults don’t know braille.


As far as why many kids aren’t learning braille, it’s a couple of reasons. Braille isn’t the right communication medium for a lot of visually impaired kids. Some do well with large print or magnified print and some have severe disabilities. The biggest thing is that we have had a huge increase over the last 20 years or so of kids being born with cortical visual impairment. It has become the leading cause of visual impairment in children. Kids with CVI tend to have complex impairments and generally are pre-literate or non-verbal. So braille is not a good fit for them. We definitely teach it whenever we can, don’t get me wrong. But there are a lot of factors at play. I think it is so important for our students to leave school with at least a basic knowledge of braille whenever it is appropriate, because it will help them so much in traveling and doing lots of basic everyday tasks, especially if there is a question about the stability of their vision moving forward.

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I’m a Braille transcriber for a local school district and I can read Braille by sight but not by touch. Learned it on the job.

TVI's have to know braille. They read it visually rather than tactilly though.

I am sure the proportion of blind people who do not know Braille is significantly large, as only totally blind people would want to learn it. I could not live without Braille, and would be happy to be a Braille tutor, if ever given the opportunity.

I had a friend who had gotten gradually more blind as he went through elementary and secondary school met him at university. He and I had frequent arguments with him saying that because of screen reading programs and the prevalence of electronic books that Braille would be obsolete in our lifetime, and I was a traditionalist and said that Braille would be around as long as print was being published.