13-year-old blind girl wants to promote braille awareness

A 13-year-old blind girl is trying to promote awareness about braille across the district.

Dayzie Simpson, of Fontwell Road, Newbury, started losing her sight when she was eight, and completely lost the ability to see last year.

Because of this, the St Bartholomew’s student became determined to learn braille, a tactile writing system made up of two vertical lines of patterned dots that is used by people who are visually impaired.

Dayzie said: “Braille is one of the most useful skills I have learnt, and it helps me with lots of aspects of life. It is something used worldwide by the blind and visually impaired community.

“My aim is to spread awareness about braille to the whole of Newbury, the whole of Berkshire, and the whole of England if I could, because believe it or not, only a small amount of people know much about it.

“People of the world should be made more aware about braille to make them more understanding of braille readers.”

In August 2021, Dayzie started to learn braille by herself using blue tac and wikki stix, which are bendable and reusable sticky bits of string.

She used the blue tac to create braille letters, while making the English letters out of wikki stix alongside them.

She then began to be taught by a qualified teacher of the visually impaired (QTVI) in the autumn, and after nine months of hard work, she finished her grade one braille course in May.

However, Dayzie knows she’s got a lot more to learn.

She said: “That was just the alphabet, numbers and a chunk of punctuation, you also need lots of other chunks such as tracking.

“Tracking means that you can identify and pick out individual letters, which is another course that I started about the same time as I did grade 1 braille.”

Dayzie finished her tracking course in September, and she is currently on the grade 2 course, which will take at least two years to complete.

“Just because you’ve learnt the grade 1 alphabet it does not stop there,” she said. “There is lots more to learn.”

Dayzie wants people who aren’t visually impaired to promote the use of braille by sharing information on social media, talking to their friends and family about it, and discovering where it is used in the local area.

She said: “You could ask in a restaurant if they have a braille menu. Even though you might not be able to read it you could say you were just checking in case someone who was blind or visually impaired came in and needed one.”

The 13-year-old thinks braille should be displayed far more often throughout the world and said she wished it was used more in packaging, newspapers, stamps, menus, and in shops and public places.

She added: “The more aware everyone is about braille, the easier life can be for people like me.”

Dayzie is really interested in politics and the news, and although she isn’t quite sure what she wants to do in the future, she knows she’d like to work with guide dogs and support families or teenagers who are going through sight loss.