Student qualifies for Braille competition
14-year-old again to go to finals in LA
Griffin Miller always does so well in the Braille Institute’s annual Braille Challenge that his family doesn’t make plans for summer until they know if he is going to the finals in Los Angeles.
Sure enough, Griffin, 14, of Adams, a freshman at Mars Area High School, is a finalist in the 2017 challenge. He has competed for seven years and has placed four times.
“It’s kind of a big deal to go out there. Our whole summer revolves around it,” said Rachel Miller, Griffin’s mom.
The academic competition is designed to motivate blind and visually impaired students to study Unified English Braille, the official Braille code of the U.S., and reward them for their successes.
Griffin’s blindness was diagnosed when he was 3 months old after his parents noticed that a friend’s 3-month-old baby was turning to follow voices in the room, and Griffin was not. “That’s all he has ever known,” Mrs. Miller said.
A researcher determined that his blindness was caused by a type of genetic mutation that does not run in the family.
In his classes at Mars Area, Griffin uses a Braille computer — a computer he won for placing first in the Braille Challenge in sixth grade.
“It can do pretty much everything you can do on a normal computer,” he said.
The computer automatically translates printed words into Braille and vice versa. “If somebody sends it to me as a Word file on a flash drive, it shows up in Braille,” Griffin said.
His does his work in Braille, “which probably most teachers won’t be able to understand,” he noted, but the computer translates it automatically into printed words.
“They have nice prizes,” his mother said of the Braille competition. “They’re usually expensive pieces of equipment.”
This year’s finals will be held June 16 and 17.
“There are several different tests, all of them equal,” Griffin explained. “If you do good on three of them and awful on one, you probably aren’t going to win.”
The first test measures speed and accuracy. “You have to listen to some guy read a passage and then you have to type it in Braille exactly as he read it,” Griffin said.
The second test is for proofreading, requiring students to find any errors in a sentence.
“Sometimes, there is more than one error. Sometimes, there are no errors,” he said.
“They try to trick you,” Mrs. Miller said.
The third test is reading comprehension, and the fourth involves reading charts, graphs and maps and then answering multiple-choice questions about them. Younger students in first through fourth grades do not take the speed and charts tests but have a spelling test instead, Griffin said.
At school, Griffin also uses a computer and a smart phone with voiceover software. Since Mars Area has a bring-yourown-technology policy, he is able to use both items, his mom said.
“They are coming up with so much stuff,” she said. “Maybe someday, he’ll be able to see.”