Author: Matthew Horspool

The American Printing House for the Blind is pleased to announce the release of an update to its popular Send to Braille application. This is a simple tool which adds options to the right click “Send to” menu to translate documents into braille and vice-versa.

This new version incorporates the latest versions of Liblouis and Pandoc, the two tools which power it. It will now handle UEB translation much more effectively and it supports translating multiple files at once.

You can download Send to Braille for free here.

This is open source software. If you are a programmer, the source code is available on Github, and this new version has been detached from the internal build system at APH so it is now much easier to contribute code. The Send to Braille team welcome any and all contributions which will improve and extend the functionality of the software.

Finally, the changes under the hood in this new version make it much easier to keep Liblouis up-to-date, so updates should be more forthcoming in future.

Have you learnt grade 1 braille and want to know where to go next? Are you learning grade 2 braille but need some help?

If so, our new “Braille Improvers” session is for you!

It is not a braille lesson, but we will share useful resources, tips and tricks, learning strategies and answer your questions.

This session will take place on the first Tuesday of the month at 7:30 PM in April, May and June. If it is successful we will consider making it a regular fixture in the Braillists calendar. Anyone is welcome, but it is particularly designed for people who have completed our recent Braille for Beginners course.

We ask that questions remain relevant to an audience that is not especially familiar with braille. Complex coding or technology questions are better suited to our regular Braille Bar, which will continue after the Easter break.

Join Braille Improvers here: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81357924044?pwd=d3pFRHZJNXpaM0ZYc2drREpFYUNmZz09

Or, to join by phone, use these details:

• Phone number: 0131 460 1196
• Meeting ID: 813 5792 4044
• Passcode: 123456

The Sight Loss Friendly Church team at Torch Trust present regular webinars for churches, entitled “Focus On …”. They concentrate on various aspects of welcoming, including and empowering blind and partially sighted people in their congregations. In October, in recognition of National Braille Week, the focus was on braille, and the archive has just been made available on their Youtube channel.

You can watch Focus On … Braille here, and if you are part of a church congregation or know someone who is, please share it with them too!

An earlier webinar concentrated on accessible digital documents, for both on-device consumption and conversion into alternative formats including braille. You can watch Focus On … Making your Documents Accessible here.

Our Book Club is a friendly and supportive group where you can practice your braille reading in a safe space. There are three groups to suit various ability levels and we are always on the lookout for new members.

We are particularly interested in hearing from people who are new to braille or who have just started learning. We have already invited everyone who has completed our recent Braille for Beginners course, but if you’re learning braille elsewhere you would still be welcome.

We will be starting new books on Thursday 5 May at 6:00 PM, and if there is enough interest we will open a fourth group to allow beginners to have more reading time. The first new book for the new group will be “A Place for Pluto”, and following that the group will have the opportunity to choose its own book. One suggestion put forward so far is “Winnie-The-Pooh”.

To express your interest in this new group, please contact Melanie Pritchard by emailing [email protected].

The Braillists will be taking a break over the Easter period. Our final session before the break will be a Book Club social on Thursday 7 April, and we will return on Saturday 30 April with our face-to-face event in Bristol. Our first online event will follow on Tuesday 3 May.

The annual CSUN Assistive Technology Conference took place last week in California, and there were lots of exciting braille and tactile graphics announcements.

This Tuesday, we’ve assembled a line-up of braille-using panellists who attended the conference who will talk us through what was announced and give their first impressions of the new products they saw.

The event starts at 7:30 PM BST and you can register for it here: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYpcO-sqzktG9TvgYRqSttK4_cqV7zNAiby

To join by telephone, please use these details:

• Phone number: 0131 460 1196
• Meeting ID: 824 7645 2710
• Passcode: 123456

The UK will move to British Summer Time on Sunday 27 March, at which point Braillists events will return to their usual US times as follows:

• Masterclasses, Braille Bar and Braille Improvers: 7:30 PM BST = 2:30 PM EDT, 1:30 PM CDT, 11:30 AM PDT
• Book Club: 6:00 PM BST = 1:00 PM EDT, 12:00 midday CDT, 10:00 AM PDT

Readers in the UK may ignore this announcement as event times in the UK will remain the same.

The US will be moving to Daylight Savings Time on Sunday 13 March. This means that Braillists events will begin an hour later than usual in the US for the next two weeks, as follows:

• Masterclasses and Braille Bar: 7:30 PM GMT = 3:30 PM EDT, 2:30 PM CDT, 12:30 PM PDT
• Book Club: 6:00 PM GMT = 2:00 PM EDT, 1:00 PM CDT, 11:00 AM PDT

The UK will be moving to summer time on Sunday 27 March, at which point timings in the US will revert to normal.

Readers in the UK may ignore this announcement as event times in the UK will remain the same.

Hable1 is a small Bluetooth braille keyboard designed to be used with the iPhone. Sight and Sound Technology Ltd are giving two people the opportunity to own one for free in return for user feedback. For more information, please visit www.sightandsound.co.uk/hable-1-challenge-sign-up-form

The first session of our new Braille for Beginners course starts this coming Tuesday (11 January) at 6:00 PM.

You will need pages 1-3 of the resources this week. We will start by introducing Mel and the other members of the Braillists team who will be helping to facilitate the course, and explain what we intend to cover over the next eight weeks. After that, we will move onto pre-braille skills, tracking, and the letters A, L, D and T. Finally, we will explain how braille numbers work.

To register for Braille for Beginners, please use this link: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0rdOGvrzgtH9WTECXlkSsLDU4m5Ow3zqcW

Alternatively, you can join by telephone using these details:

• Telephone Number: 0131 460 1196
• Meeting ID: 896 3871 3751
• Passcode: 325661

For more information about the course, please visit braillists.org/beginners.