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Why should I consider learning Braille?

I thought ?Talking Books? would provide information for the Blind! Yes they do but only partially. For example, blind students can communicate to others through the written word, only if they know how to spell, compose thoughts, and edit their documents. Early results found that unless blind students learned to read Braille, they did not learn correct spelling, to compose documents, take notes in class, and have written reference material available to them.

They are also unable to learn to interact with their sighted peers and take part in regular classroom activities. For example, the teacher tells a student to turn to page 26 and read to the class. Without Braille, the blind student cannot participate. Our Braille group volunteers work in schools to tutor blind students with their Braille skills, and they learn very rapidly. We have a first grade student, age 6, who know her Braille alphabet, can write sentences and short paragraphs, and participate in class activities requiring reading. 

So, how does a book get transcribed into Braille? First some basics. One textbook page will expand to 3 to 5 Braille pages during the process. Braille textbooks are 11? by 11?5 inches and each sheet is made from a light card stock. One chapter in a typical textbook is about all the weight a child can carry along with the other school supplies and books they need for the daily class routines. Each Braille volume is about 2 inches thick so a 20-chapter book can easily occupy 40 inches of shelf space or nearly 4 feet. The cost of a Braille textbook to the local school averages $500 per copy. Not many school budgets can afford that thereby causing a problem. Congress requires parallel materials to be available to the blind student that the sighted students use. The ?fat?s in the fire? when a family sues the school because these materials are not available to their child.

What is the solution? Volunteers all over the United States have formed groups to teach Braille skills to people interested in transcribing books into Braille. Talk about rewarding!!! You can only imagine our joy when one of our students recently graduated from the University of South Florida with a Masters Degree in linguistics. This young woman has been blind since birth, and is a direct product of the Sarasota County School system and the volunteer work our Sarasota County Braille Transcribers did for her from the earliest grades through College. As an example, she completed one of her classes where we Brailed her textbook and received a 4.0 average!!!

OK, what is the current situation and how do I get involved. Many Braille transcribers are the product of a ?40?s and 50?s society where Mom stayed home, raised the kids, and had extra time on her hands. Many of the groups were sponsored by the Jewish Sisterhoods who recognized the need to help blind students and did something about it. Many of these folks are in their 70?s and 80?s and won?t be able to continue working for many more years. So we have a real crisis with the demand for Braille increasing exponentially and very few new Braille transcribers.

The Braille learning Process

A person becomes a certified Braille Transcriber by submitting a 35-page document to the Library of Congress. The document is graded and if fewer than 10 mistakes are made, certification is granted in literary Braille. At that point the person is capable of producing Braille material, unsupervised, for the blind. Lesson materials are available through the Library of Congress (http://www.loc.gov/nls/bds.html ) free of charge and can be completed by mail. The best way is to pair up with a Braille instructor near you and establish a relationship of advice and critique. The same people at the Library of Congress will be able to help locate someone near you. Learning Braille is exactly like learning a new language. The work is satisfying, challenging, and when you have achieved certification, you get a great sense of pride. You might try contacting the state division of blind services, or the nearest ?Lighthouse for the Blind? for additional information.

What happens to my work?

Now for the good news! The Braille system is well organized and has an excellent system of sharing work. With the latest software for Braille Transcription nearing completion our work is all done on a computer and saved as a computer file. In Florida, requests for Braille are received from the schools by the Florida Instructional Materials Center (FIMC) located in Tampa. These requests are then listed on a weekly email to the various Transcriber groups and a group notifies FIMC they will do the work. Completed work is then forwarded as a computer file to FIMC where the books are actually produced. The software we use in Florida is purchased from ?Computer Application Specialties Company ( www.c-a-s.com ) in Lincoln, Nebraska. It operates very much like a word processor so you can enter direct Braille ( insert the actual Braille cells ), convert text to Braille from a file saved in Rich Text Format (.rtf), convert scanned material to Braille, and soon will be able to process publisher files.

So why learn Braille if it is becoming automated. Braille format is governed by very strict rules. There are 40 Braille cells on a line and 25 lines on a page. The purpose of the formatting is to alert the blind reader that a different kind of material is coming. For example, directions for the student are indented to the 5th Braille Cell and any runover appears in block form in the next row at the 5th cell. Marginal notes, begin at the 7th cell and runover is continued on the next line in the 5th cell. A list of items begins in the first cell and runover is indented to the 3rd cell on the following line. In each instance I have given, the blind reader knows the kind of material to expect by how it is placed on the page. So far, no process has been devised to properly place material in the correct Braille format.


Computer Braille Graphics

Braille graphics, are a whole other problem. Try running your finger over an outline of an object someone has cut out and you have not seen, and identify the object. Now try to think how you would describe it if you have no idea what it looks like and have never seen a similar object before. This is exactly the problem for a blind student. For this reason, most graphics are simply eliminated and described in a ?Transcriber note? in text if the graphic contains information the student needs. If you have seen a modern textbook lately, you?ll see that many of the graphics ?just look nice? and contain no useful information required by the student. When we give Braille talks to sighted groups, the subject of relief maps is usually brought up and how ?wonderful? they are. Actually they are just a big ?pain? for the blind student because there is so much information in the map they are unable to follow it. Example, we asked one of our blind high school students to tell us what she was able to learn from a graphic of Africa and showing Lake Victoria. After considerable time she told us that as far as she was concerned, the map was a waste of time and she preferred to get the information in Braille text.
After getting similar reactions from other blind students we have learned to include very limited information in a graphic.

There is a swell paper process (http://www.modern-world-data.com/Tactile%20Products.htm ) that is used to produced line drawings the student is able to use. We have learned to vary the background with different texture screens that produce a set of different ?feels? for the blind reader. This is working well with our students and we are learning all the time. I mentioned before our young woman with her Masters Degree. We showed the same graphic to her and during the conversation she said ? I have no idea what a mountain is!? Boy, does that bring you back to basics in a hurry! So you try to present graphics in as simple a form as you can and in many cases simply describe the important information in Braille.

Conclusion

If you enjoy a challenge, enjoy reading, and like to help people, Braille Transcription may be for you. For further information, contact ( http://www.loc.gov/nls/bds.html ) or use the suggestions early in this article to find the nearest Braille group and talk with them about Braille Transcription lessons.

I was asked to give a laundry list of materials necessary to produce Braille volumes. Technology is changing so rapidly that such a list would be out of date in a week. If you want advice on hardware, drop me a line and we?ll give you the latest information we have at that time. 

 

Lion Pete Schuyler p.schuylerfl@verizon.net
Sarasota Lions Club and Sarasota County Braille Transcribers, Inc.