The Alphabetic Braille and Contracted Braille Study examined the reading and writing skills of young braille-reading students. Students who were introduced to more contractions earlier in instruction performed better on reading measures, such as vocabulary, decoding, and comprehension, but all students did well in spelling. Thus, the authors conclude that literacy instruction should focus primarily on basic reading skills.

This study used the Delphi research method to gain a consensus among 40 professionals on the appropriate levels of instructional service to address the needs of students with visual impairments in 12 areas of braille literacy skills. These resulting recommendations are general guidelines for educational teams to follow in designing braille literacy programs, but must be tailored to address the individual needs of each student.

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This article presents a two-phase process to be used by multidisciplinary teams in making decisions on the reading medium for students with visual impairments. The first phase is used as a diagnostic teaching phase primarily to collect information on a student's use of sensory information during the reading readiness stage in order to guide the team decision on introduction of a specific reading medium. In the second phase, continued evaluation of the initial decision takes place over a number of years to evaluate and adjust, as appropriate, the reading medium as determined in the first phase and to assure that the student has access to the combination of media necessary to be successful in academic and vocational settings.

Braille-reading mathematicians, scientists, and computer scientists were asked to examine the usability of the Unified English Braille Code (UEB) for technical materials. They had little knowledge of the code prior to the study. The research included two reading tasks, a short tutorial about UEB, and a focus group. The results indicated that the participants believed that UEB could be effectively used by people who are employed in technical fields.