Author: Matthew Horspool

Based in Canada, the AT Banter podcast provides a balanced and entertaining look at the field of Assistive Technology, with insights and discussions from varied specialists.

Braillists Secretary Matthew Horspool Appeared on episode 239, where he talked about the state of braille in the UK and some of the challenges faced by organizations which work to advocate for, and teach, braille.

The Braillists Foundation got a mention too, of course! Check it out via the links above or search for “AT Banter” wherever you get your podcasts.

If you use a BrailleNote Touch Plus notetaker or Brailliant BI X braille display, and would be interested in testing new software before it’s released to the general public, we encourage you to read the below message from Andrew Flatres, Product Manager – Braille Products, HumanWare:

In light of new improvements to the products life cycle, HumanWare seeks beta testers to ensure stability and customer satisfaction in new firmware. HumanWare knows the importance of these products, so we want to ensure that any future software enhancements have been thoroughly reviewed and tested by actual users.

By becoming a beta tester, you will have first use of the latest firmware, where you’ll be asked to use and validate new features introduced in addition to its normal usage. Beta testing does, however, involve good communication skills and dedication.

If you are interested in potentially becoming a beta tester and have already got in the hand a new BI X display (20X or 40X) or a BrailleNote Touch Plus, please register your interest by filling out this Google form.

Please note there is limited space available. Therefore, please ensure you have submitted your interest by the Closing date 31st May 2021.

For further information about this opportunity, please email Andrew directly.

Braille Literacy Canada Symposium: From Braille Literacy to Empowerment

Braille Literacy Canada (BLC) will be holding a virtual braille symposium on Friday, June 4th, 2021 from 6 – 11 PM BST (1 – 6 PM EDT/10am-3pm Pacific/11am-4pm Mountain/Saskatchewan, 12pm-5pm Central, 2pm-7pm Atlantic). This event will be of interest to braille readers, educators, transcribers, parents and anyone else who is passionate about the empowerment that braille literacy brings!

The schedule of events is as follows:

• 1:00pm EST: Creating Empowerment Through a Joy of Reading and Writing (Cay Holbrook)
• 2:00pm EST: How Many Braille Readers? (Frances Mary D’Andrea)
• 3:00pm EST: An introduction to the Museum of the American Printing House for the Blind (Michael A. Hudson)
• 4:00pm EST: An Instant Translation – Creating printed math output on the BrailleNote Touch Plus (Peter Tucic)
• 5:00pm EST: Braille Trivia – Tea Time / Happy Hour

Each presentation will be approximately 30 minutes long, followed by a 15 minute question-and-answer period, and then a 15 minute intermission. More information on our exciting line up of speakers is provided below.

The event will be free of charge to members (or members of organizations who are corporate members of BLC) and $20 for non-members. Interested in becoming a BLC member? Annual membership is $20 – check out our membership section for more information!

Please see the workshop page on the BLC web site for all of the latest details!

TO REGISTER, please write to [email protected] on or before Wednesday, May 26th, 2021. You will receive the Zoom link to join the symposium a few days before the event. Note that live automatic captioning will be provided through Zoom, and written transcripts of the presentations will be made available after the event.

Creating Empowerment Through a Joy of Reading and Writing

Presented at 6pm BST (1pm EST, 10am Pacific, 11am Mountain/Saskatchewan, 12pm Central, 2pm Atlantic) by Cay Holbrook, Ph.D.

Parents and teachers spend a great deal of time in the early developmental years addressing the skills of reading and writing. While skills are critical to the task of reading and writing, this is only part of the story. It is not sufficient that children are able to decode words and produce letters that form words. Instead, the big picture of literacy has a component of exploration, creativity, fun and joy. This presentation will focus on joyful literacy and how to build empowerment through love of reading and writing.

Cay Holbrook is currently a professor at The University of British Columbia in Vancouver, BC, Canada where she has lived since 1998. Cay began working as a teacher of students with visual impairments. She completed her Ph.D in 1986 and held faculty positions at Johns Hopkins University and The University of Arkansas at Little Rock. Cay’s research and scholarship have focused on literacy in all forms for individuals with visual impairments. She has published several textbooks, several on the topic of braille and/or literacy. She continues to conduct research in the area and is currently involved with colleagues at Rice University in a large research project designed to explore the way that braille is taught and used by school-age children.

How Many Braille Readers?

Presented at 7pm BST (2pm EST, 11am Pacific, 12pm Mountain/Saskatchewan, 1pm Central, 3pm Atlantic) by Frances Mary D’Andrea, Ph.D.

How many braille readers are in the United States? This question is surprisingly difficult to answer. This presentation will report on research conducted with colleagues to search for “the statistic” that is so elusive. The project included a search of the literature from the early 20th century up to the present day to determine the number of braille reading children and adults in the United States, describing the terms and definitions used by different sources. More importantly, this presentation will invite a discussion about why this is an issue with important policy implications. Has there been a decline in braille readership in recent years? Has the nature of what is means to be a “braille reader” changed with the advent of technology? What research needs to be conducted regarding braille literacy? These and other public policy issues will be discussed in light of the search results.

Frances Mary D’Andrea, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of practice at the University of Pittsburgh. Prior to joining the faculty at Pitt, she was an educational consultant specializing in literacy issues for students with visual impairments, and was an adjunct instructor at several U.S. universities. She was a teacher of students with visual impairments in various schools; from 1995-2005, she worked at the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB), and helped establish their National Literacy Center. She is a past-chair of the Braille Authority of North America (BANA); she has served as AFB’s representative to BANA since 1998. She is currently secretary of the International Council on English Braille. She is co-author of several textbooks including Ashcroft Programmed Instruction in Braille: Unified English Braille. She serves on numerous committees and national task forces related to the education of students with visual impairments.

An introduction to the Museum of the American Printing House for the Blind

Presented at 8pm BST (3pm EST, 12pm Pacific, 1pm Mountain/Saskatchewan, 2pm Central, 4pm Atlantic) by Michael A. Hudson

Join Museum Director Mike Hudson for a walk through the Museum of the American Printing House for the Blind in Louisville Kentucky. Founded in 1858, APH is the world’s largest manufacturer of braille and educational products for folks that are blind or visually impaired. The museum opened in 1994 and Mike joined the team in 2005. The collection and exhibits tell the history of education and rehabilitation efforts since the late 18th century and the first tactile books, a large collection of braillewriters and braille slate, fascinating electronic travel aids and other technology, a cornucopia of educational aids, tactile maps, and countless photographs and documents. The museum recently added the AFB Helen Keller Archive, cementing it, in Mike’s opinion if nobody else’s, as an essential stop for anyone with an interest in blindness history.

Micheal A. Hudson has been the Museum Director at the American Printing House for the Blind in Louisville, KY since 2005. He has degrees in history from Kentucky Wesleyan College and the University of Delaware.

An Instant Translation – Creating printed math output on the BrailleNote Touch Plus

Presented at 9pm BST (4pm EST, 1pm Pacific, 2pm Mountain/Saskatchewan, 3pm Central, 5pm Atlantic) by Peter Tucic

Join Peter Tucic, Brand Ambassador of Blindness Products for HumanWare, for a discussion of working with math content on the BrailleNote Touch Plus. Peter will run participants through the workflow a student can easily implement to turn in assignments at the same time as sighted peers. Peter will also discuss how one can send documents containing math content to a student for viewing on the BrailleNote Touch Plus and how a student can in-turn send completed work to teachers via electronic means. This is especially relevant during these times of extended remote learning and will continue to be relevant as we move forward within the connected classroom.

Peter Tucic graduated from the University of Illinois at Chicago with a Bachelor of Arts Degree in History. Peter is currently the Brand Ambassador of Blindness Products for HumanWare. He travels throughout the US and Canada, supporting teachers and students and presenting at state and national conferences. Peter has presented at such conferences as the National ACB and NFB, in addition to the CSUN and ATIA conferences amongst many others. Peter has also been published in Closing the Gap magazine and regularly creates written and video tutorials for a wide array of products.

Braille Trivia – Tea Time / Happy Hour

Hosted from 10 to 11pm BST (5 to 6pm EST, 2-3pm Pacific, 3-4pm Mountain/Saskatchewan, 4-5pm Central, 6-7pm Atlantic) by Tami Grenon

Join us as we celebrate Braille Literacy Canada and the empowerment of literacy through braille! To wrap up the symposium, we invite all to join us for tea time or happy hour (depending on where in the country you live!) and enjoy a fun game of virtual braille trivia, where you and your teams will test your knowledge of braille related facts! Plus, there will be door prizes! Fun, friends, and prizes – all wrapped up in a celebration of braille literacy!

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Visit our web site or join us on social media:

• On Twitter: @BrlLitCan
• On Facebook
• On LinkedIn

As many readers will be aware, in response to the UK’s national lockdown in March 2020, we launched our Stay Safe: Stay Connected campaign “to minimize the impact of social isolation on blind and partially sighted people and work out what practical support we’ll be able to offer our community”. The response was overwhelmingly positive, at a time when nothing was certain and many other organisations were forced to suspend their services, and we are humbled by all the feedback and encouragement we have received.

The mainstay of this campaign was our community call at 6:00 PM every Friday, which has continued virtually uninterrupted since its inception. However, as the UK’s Coronavirus vaccination programme continues to gain momentum and the Governments have announced plans to gradually, but permanently, re-open the country, we anticipate that more social contact will occur within our community and local face-to-face support services will begin to re-open. We have also seen the steady emergence of other telephone and internet-based activities for blind and partially sighted people, some of which are likely to continue beyond the pandemic.

We have therefore taken the decision to bring our Friday Open Forum to an end over the next few weeks, with the final session taking place on Friday 14 May 2021. This is in-line with the anticipated move to step three of the four-step roadmap for England, which permits groups of up to six people from multiple households to meet indoors and indoor hospitality to re-open.

We will, however, continue to offer our very successful braille Masterclasses, our Book Club will carry on as normal, and our newly formed Braille Clinics will provide a safe space for people to ask their braille questions. Our Braillecast podcast, which has grown in popularity in recent months, will continue to be produced, and we will be looking to introduce some face-to-face Braillists events in the coming months. Braillists are also welcome to stay connected via our email discussion forum and social media channels.

We appreciate that this decision will come as a disappointment to some and, as such, we will collect information about alternative social events in the coming weeks and make this information available via our website. If you know of any events which you think should be included in this list, please get in touch. We also welcome enquiries from individuals/organizations who would like to explore the possibility of taking ownership of these sessions moving forwards.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank the many guests and volunteers who made our Stay Safe: Stay Connected calls possible, and also to thank everyone in the community who participated and made the sessions so worthwhile. We are enormously proud of the positive impact of our calls on the lives of blind and partially sighted people, and hope you will continue to join us as we enter into a new chapter of promoting braille usage.

As is becoming customary of late, we have taken the opportunity to continue to refine our website over the Easter holidays. Here are the highlights:

• We have significantly streamlined the design of our Projects page, corrected errors and added new content.
• Our Groups page has been similarly redesigned, so the overall structure of the website is much less complex and menus should be easier to navigate.
• Our Partners and Sponsors page now reflects our grant from the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust, alongside a number of other small changes.
• There is no longer a technical error on our Forum page.

In addition, a few months ago, we quietly added a search facility to the website which a few users have been testing for us. It seems to be working well on the whole, so we would like to take this opportunity to formally announce it.

Finally, we are making significant changes to our content database and hosting infrastructure behind the scenes which will make search results even more relevant, allow pages to load faster, and pave the way for exciting upgrades to our website in the not too distant future. Watch this space for more announcements soon!

In the meantime, although we don’t expect our changes under the hood to have an adverse impact on visitors, things do inevitably go wrong from time to time. If you do experience any problems, please write to us at [email protected] so we can put them right.

We hope you enjoy browsing our website and look forward to hearing your feedback.

We’ve been making some changes under the hood to try to make it easier for people to listen to our Braillecast podcast on smart speakers, especially those powered by Amazon Alexa.

Unfortunately, we still haven’t found a perfect solution. However, as a temporary workaround, we have added some more keywords to our feed title so that it now reads: “Braillecast: Connecting the Dots for Braillists Everywhere”.

Smart speakers should have now registered this change, so if asking for Braillecast doesn’t work, try asking for “Braillecast Connecting the Dots” or other permutations of keywords from the feed title.

On Alexa devices, the following phrase seems to work the most consistently: “Alexa, play the podcast Braillecast, Connecting the Dots for Braillists Everywhere.”

We are continuing to work on a better long-term solution, but we hope this change makes our podcast more accessible in the meantime.

P.S. we’ve also received a message from HumanWare to say that they have fixed a known issue with our episodes not downloading properly on Victor Reader Streams. If you’re a Victor Reader Stream user and you’ve been having trouble with our podcast, please try again, and let us know at [email protected] if it still doesn’t work for you.

Almost a year ago to the day, in the height of the first UK national lockdown, we launched our Clever Cooking group. A vibrant and enthusiastic community quickly emerged and, in spite of many changes, it’s still going strong today!

It’s now being facilitated independently by a group of Clever Cooking members, who are currently deciding when the sessions will take place and what topics will be covered. They are always on the lookout for new people to join the sessions, so if you’re handy in the kitchen or want to improve your culinary skills, please get in touch with them.

Their email address is [email protected]. Once they’ve heard from you, they can add you to their mailing list where they will announce the date of the next session once it’s been decided. If you provide your mobile number, they can also add you to their WhatsApp group.

We’re really pleased to see this community continue to flourish.

Happy cooking!

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been working with a local transcriber who’s been busy creating text transcripts of our Masterclasses. The first six – which took place before Christmas – are now available on our Media page:

• Getting Around the Orbit Reader 20
• An Introduction to the Slate and Stylus
• Using Braille for Language Learning
• An Introduction to Braille Music
• An Introduction to Braille Labelling
• An Introduction to the Abacus

A text transcript of our panel event for World Braille Day is also available.

These transcripts will be especially useful for DeafBlind individuals, but you might also appreciate them if you’d like to find a particular section of a Masterclass, English isn’t your first language, or simply if you find it easier to learn from text rather than audio. They are currently available in Microsoft Word format, but we’ll be adding more formats in the coming months.

If you have any feedback about these transcripts, we’d be delighted to hear from you. Please email [email protected]. The remaining Masterclasses in our “Braille for Academic and Career Development” series, which took place after Christmas, will be available soon.

And one more thing – the Media page is now completely up-to-date, so if you’re looking for a recording of, or handout from, any of our previous sessions, you can find them there.

We’re delighted that Goalball UK chose to feature us in their latest “Shining a Spotlight on …” article. You can read their interview with Holly, our Head of Courses, here – and thanks very much to Goalball UK for the publicity!

For some time now, we’ve been running our Book Club on a Thursday at 6:00 PM. The idea is that anyone who wants to improve their braille reading can come along, read a page or two of a book to the rest of the group, and get help from other fellow members when they get stuck.

The current book is “Kensuke’s Kingdom” by Michael Morpurgo, available in both grades 1 and 2 on the latest Orbit Reader SD card, and also available in hard copy via the RNIB library.

Numbers have been steadily increasing over time and, as such, we’re now able to divide people up according to reading speed – so quicker readers don’t feel held back, and more leisurely readers can keep reading at a pace that suits them. The two groups are called “Intermediate” and “Advanced” and, thanks to the magic of Breakout Rooms in Zoom, they both take place simultaneously using the same Meeting ID and join link.

When you come for the first time, you’ll be asked which group you’d like to join. If you’re not sure, you can always join one group and switch to the other one the following week if you think it would suit you better.

Everyone is made to feel extremely welcome, and there’s an opportunity for the two groups to meet together at the start and end of each session.

So whether you’ve given us a try before but didn’t get on with the format, or you’ve never heard of the Book Club before but think it sounds like something you’d enjoy, please consider joining us on Thursday at 6:00 PM GMT. Sessions last an hour and can be joined by computer, smartphone, tablet or telephone.

The Zoom Meeting ID is: 893 5322 0947
Join Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89353220947

We look forward to seeing you!