St. Albert student is off to an international tournament in Los Angeles for Braille reading

Original story as published by the St. Albert Gazette
May 18, 2019
By Kevin Ma

Leo Nickerson Grade 6 student Veda Bubevska uses her BrailleNote Touch computer the school's library on Thursday. She is off to an international tournament in Los Angeles at end of June for Braille reading. CHRIS COLBOURNE/St. Albert Gazette

Braille master off to LA

A blind Leo Nickerson student is off to Los Angeles next month to compete in an international Braille competition.

Grade 6 student Veda Bubevska learned earlier this month that she was one of four Canadians to qualify for the finals of the Braille Challenge – a Canada/U.S. competition run by the non-profit Braille Institute that tests the ability of grade-school students to read and write in Braille.

Braille is a complex set of raised bumps that translate into letters and words that allow those who are blind to read, explained Jacky Garcia of the Braille Institute. Practitioners not only have to master all the usual letters, numbers, and punctuation marks, but also over 189 contractions of words (an isolated “c” can be short for “can,” for example) and the many rules associated with them.

Bubevska, who can see a bit of light and shadow but has otherwise been blind since birth, said she started learning Braille back in Kindergarten and mastered it in about two years.

“I like reading funny books and watching funny movies,” she said, and she’s a big fan of the Harry Potter series.

When she first started out, Bubevska said she wrote using a Braille typewriter, which was pretty annoying as there was no way to correct mistakes. Books were also pretty hefty – her math text is about 30 volumes. Nowadays, she reads and writes with a computer.

The finals will see 50 students in five age categories complete timed tests of spelling, transcription, proofreading, reading comprehension, and graph interpretation for a shot at up to $2,500 in prizes, Garcia said. Each will have completed similar tests at regional events earlier this year – the Alberta contest was in Calgary last March.

Bubevska said she planned to do a lot of studying to prepare for next month’s event, and predicted that the graphs would be her toughest test. She also hoped to check out Disneyland while she was in Los Angeles.

The finals are this June 21-22 at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. www.brailleinstitute.org/braille-challenge has the details