Kai Wang, 13, practices on a Perkins Brailler in the basement of his Central Berkeley home. This weekend he heads to USC in Los Angeles as the sole California qualifier for the National Braille Challenge finals — and the first Braille-only student enrolled in Berkeley Unified in decades.

In the basement of his home in Central Berkeley — the room his family calls "Kai's office" — 13-year-old Kai Wang has been drilling on a dark green mechanical Braille typewriter. Keys press raised dots into thick paper. This weekend, the practice travels south: Kai is one of 50 blind and visually impaired students from across the country and around the world competing in the National Braille Challenge finals at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. He is the only student from California.

The competition, now in its 26th year, is put on by the Braille Institute of America — the only event of its kind — and tests students across five categories: reading comprehension, proofreading, speed, accuracy, and reading charts and graphs.

Kai, a seventh grader at Longfellow Middle School, is the first Braille-only student to enroll in Berkeley Unified in decades, according to his parents. His mother, Sun — founder of the nonprofit Paths to Accessibility — spent years arguing that audio learning was not a substitute for reading. She negotiated a 2022 landmark settlement with BUSD requiring the district to audit its technology and create a formal process for accessibility complaints. The daily reality at school remains uneven. "There's a term in the blind education field called 'accessible material insecurity,'" Sun told Berkeleyside. "It's like food insecurity, and you don't know tomorrow if you're going to have food."

Berkeley is, in some ways, the right address for that particular fight. The city was central to the Disability Rights Movement of the 1960s and '70s, and the East Bay Center for the Blind, based here, continues to offer support and Braille resources. Among Kai's mentors is Josh Miele — a Berkeley-based scientist who won a MacArthur "genius" prize for his work on adaptive technology for the blind — who told Berkeleyside that what's remarkable about Kai is not his disability but the extra energy he expends just to access what should be available to him by default.

The broader picture on Braille is stark: only about 13 percent of U.S. blind students can read it, according to a 2016 survey, a figure that reflects decades of schools shifting toward audio learning. A 2018 study found that 90 percent of people who are Braille-literate are employed, compared with 33 percent of those who are not.

Kai also has memorized Pi to 225 digits, co-designed a tactile nature lab at the California Academy of Sciences, plays viola, violin, and drums, and competes nationally in paraclimbing, goalball, and long-distance running. "I'm really excited to compete," he told Berkeleyside. "I think it's a big deal."

The Perkins Brailler on his desk — the device he's been practicing on — has not been truly upgraded since 1951.

Reporting by Hope Muñoz/Berkeleyside.