The Reading Rates for Contracted and Uncontracted Braille of Blind Norwegian Adults

This article reports on a study of 35 late-blind Norwegian adults, aged 20-70, in reading equivalent texts and single words in contracted and uncontracted braille. The objective was to register their general reading behavior and to measure their reading rates for both types of Norwegian braille. Although the subjects’ reading rates increased when they read contracted versions of both the text passages and single words, their rates were higher with the contracted single words. Furthermore, the slow readers saved more time than did the fast readers when they read texts in which contractions were used frequently.