Vision loss runs in my family and has affected a few of my uncles and grandparents, so I’ve seen this multiple times.
Braille can absolutely be learned at any age, and is a godsend for an avid reader. My grandmother learned braille at 72 and it changed her life - she never got into audio books, and I think she also appreciated the community of her local braille library. She also had a braille reader which attached to a console and worked surprisingly well - perhaps ironically she became much more technically capable and comfortable after losing her sight. She used that to write and read email in pine (I set that up for her in the early 2000’s, I’m sure better options exist now.)
My uncles who’ve lost their sight both picked up braille early and have barely skipped a beat. I believe learning and leveraging braille while partially sighted both made it easier to adapt and mitigated the emotional impact of their loss as it progressed.
There are other advances in tactile displays happening every day now, one which I’ve been following is https://pad.dotincorp.com/.
PS. If your mother has AMD (as my family does), be aware that there’s a significant hereditary component. You should be sure to inform your doctor and consider annual ophthalmologist checkups.
Interestingly Lego just announced they're releasing a block set to help kids learn Braille. From what I can tell it comes with 5 full sets of alphabets and numbers so you should be able to form most words. But I could be misreading the product description haha
I figure it's worth throwing out there in case anyone was curious to learn it and finds having the tactile option of putting the blocks together as potentially helpful
As a teenager I picked it up in a few weeks of halfhearted practice while visiting blind relatives. It was a struggle for a few hours until it “clicked.”
It’a not like learning a new language, just a different alphabet with mostly 1:1 substitutions. (I figure most punctuation out from context.) It’s like learning Morse code.
A book, but you may find useful to be able to write short texts in Braille also so you can fix embossed tags and notes in parts of the house to help when you aren't around.
TeX/LaTeX can write braille (that you can later print with a braille printer).
Braille can absolutely be learned at any age, and is a godsend for an avid reader. My grandmother learned braille at 72 and it changed her life - she never got into audio books, and I think she also appreciated the community of her local braille library. She also had a braille reader which attached to a console and worked surprisingly well - perhaps ironically she became much more technically capable and comfortable after losing her sight. She used that to write and read email in pine (I set that up for her in the early 2000’s, I’m sure better options exist now.)
My uncles who’ve lost their sight both picked up braille early and have barely skipped a beat. I believe learning and leveraging braille while partially sighted both made it easier to adapt and mitigated the emotional impact of their loss as it progressed.
There are other advances in tactile displays happening every day now, one which I’ve been following is https://pad.dotincorp.com/.
PS. If your mother has AMD (as my family does), be aware that there’s a significant hereditary component. You should be sure to inform your doctor and consider annual ophthalmologist checkups.