The article that inspired
The New York Daily News recently came out with an article named "
The Braille Trail: Inside the Push to Restore Literacy for the Blind" (video below). The article is powerful in its theme to encourage braille literacy among blind or visually impaired individuals. Several students from the New York Institute for Special Education voice how helpful it has been in their everyday life to be able to read Braille. One student even stated that "If I didn't learn to read or write Braille I wouldn't exactly be good in school."
The number of audio devices available for the blind today has increased tremendously, and unfortunately many people seem to be confused in terms of what is still needed in order to exist in mainstream society. As we mention in the article
The importance of Braille, it is fundamental for ALL individuals to learn the skills of reading and writing in order to progress and gain independence.
Braille books CAN be easier to produce
Aside from the hopeful dialog of the article, there was one point that really caught my attention. Currently in 36 correctional facilities in the United States, braille textbooks are being producted by the inmates. While blind students across America are thankful for their hard work, the inmates claim that; "unfortunately, Braille textbooks are large and expensive to produce - a labor-intensive process where transcribing a single textbook sometimes takes six months." This is simply not true, not if you use booklet format in the
Index BrailleBox (Everest-D also supports this format).
Braille books have gotten the name to be time consuming and expensive due to outdated binding methods that are far too often still used, unfortunately. As seen in the video clip, the prison is using an old Braillo embosser which supports these outdated methods.
However, the good news is that there is another solution; with the BrailleBox V5, using any standard cut-sheet A3 or 11"x17" heavy paper and booklet format instead. This is naturally a much easier and less time consuming process as much of the manual labor is removed.
- BrailleBox V5 embosses 300 characters per second and about 900 pages per hour - after which the embossed pages will stack in the correct page order with a dotted braille line down the center of the page (booklet format), you may then simply fold along this central braille line and you have a completed braille book.
- After having folded the A3 size paper in half (along the braille line), each printed page will then be in A4 size [or with tabloid size 11"x17", you then have a letter size page]. Shall you wish, you can staple along the central line and "bind" the pages that way. In this case use a heavy duty stapler such as the Index Braille stapler. It is honestly that easy, see for yourself in the video below.
Embossing braille books in volumes
This would best suite textbook embossing as seen in the above first video as volume printing is suitable for larger braille documents. This is because unlike ink documents, Braille is much thicker and bulkier due to the text being in raised dot format on the paper (Braille).
If, for example, you are embossing a document of 110 pages, you may select each volume size to be 40 pages, the book will then be made into 3 separate volumes. Volume 1 will consist of (pages 1-40), volume 2 (pages 41-80) and volume 3 (81-110). The braille page number and volume number is then applied automatically by the BrailleBox embosser.
Volume printing is very practical for longer documents, especially if you choose to emboss with a standard file such as Word of PDF and emboss using the direct printing application idB (
Index-direct-Braille).
Just maybe
Now lets make this the standard for braille book production:
- cut-sheet paper = much cheaper and more readily available
- booklet format = much less manual labor and time consumption
- (AND, matter of fact the BrailleBox itself costs a mere fraction of the price compared to the seen competitor embosser used.)
Perhaps then there would be more Braille textbooks, among other braille documents, available to blind students and visually impaired individuals in general, because finally it wouldn't be just inmates who had "the time" to create these wonderful resources, but your everyday person.
It is important for ALL individuals of society to have equal opportunities, and without the skills to read and write this is not possible, so lets restore braille literacy today!