Hey there, I am a 29 year old totally blind man who had learned Braille as a kid. I would be pleased and happy to talk with you or your colleagues about my learning in Braille.

Happily most of the difficulties I had had with Braille have since been solved through the latest Unified English Braille code mods (getting rid of a few contractions making new rules so that no contractions look like other symbols that type of thing) I had had difficulties getting Braille textbooks and my educational assistant had to sometimes help me by scanning in textbooks and then transcribing them to Braille. I hope to be a Braille transcriber as my career as I heard last October of a local schoolboard looking for some.

I learned braille in 3 weeks. I'm still a slow reader, but I got the hang of Grade 1 very quickly once I figured out the pattern and memorized contracted Grade 2 UEB by practicing labeling things and putting braille on 3 full sets of Cards Against Humanity with all the expansions. I started taking classes about a year after I lost all my vision, started off feeling the Grade 1 letters in a muffin tin filled with tennis balls, then moved on to tactile graphics. Feeling large shapes on paper and determining which one was different, then progressively having the images and details get smaller and smaller until I was building up the sensitivity necessary for braille characters themselves. The primer books are large and inconvenient, but feeling and manipulating the real thing helped me learn good hand positioning and reading tips and tricks.
I got a Perkins brailler and that really helped me learn at a faster rate, plus it also inadvertently taught me how to use braille screen input on my iPhone so I can type faster than my sighted friends. I studied at the Lighthouse in SF and enjoyed the one on one classes.

Braille music, however, was a fucking nightmare. I tried the Hadley course on that, and didn't realize how dumb braille music was until I got to the more advanced books. It really dragged me down since I was really looking forward to rading music again, but it just got ridiculous and I burned out on it very quickly, giving up the course.

Braille is my nemesis.

It is amazingly difficult to learn especially if you didn't learn it as a very young child, even really proficient people are still very slow at it compared to reading print, the books end up being huge and incredibly heavy so you can't really travel with them like you would a normal novel, and what's available tends to be targeted firmly at the older generation.

Also I play guitar for a living and I have huge patches of hard skin on my fingers, which kind of puts the final nail in the coffin.

Hi. I am saying this as someone who legitimately cares about your research. You need to attempt to look more professional with your research posts. Create a username with your real name with any completed degrees written beside it. Link to a personal website that has a list of your accomplishments. Provide your school email address. These social media posts are like job interviews. How on earth are we supposed to determine if you are an actual researcher or just some predator creep?