Category: Uncategorised

Victorian Britain was a heavily visual era. Sighted people gained access to the Penny Post, and the ability to communicate with friends across the nation with relative ease in an alphabet which was already well-established. On the other hand, for the blind community, many different tactile alphabets were invented simultaneously to address their exclusion from this culture, and blind education was completely decentralised.

Tilly Guthrie is a PhD researcher in the history of tactile literacy, specialising in the period between the invention of Braille in the 1820s and its eventual adoption in Britain at the end of the nineteenth century. In this conversation with Braillists Chairman, Dave Williams, she will describe some of the tactile alphabets in use at that time, and show how their concurrence affected blind people’s access to culture and community and how blindness was perceived by the sighted.

Register here.

To join by phone, please use these details:

• Phone number: 0131 460 1196
• Meeting ID: 840 2014 9850
• Passcode: 123456

5 Connell Street, Limavady, Londonderry, BT49 0EA

Braille enthusiast Mary Lea is hosting a braille-themed event at Limavady Library on Wednesday 19 February 2025.

Children from local primary schools will visit from 2:00 PM, and secondary school children and other interested people from 3:00 PM.

The event will provide a hands on introduction to braille, with a Perkins brailler on show, plenty of examples of writing systems and books, braille stickers and name badges, and braille moulds for arts and crafts.

For more information, please contact us and we will put you in touch with Mary.

The Australia & New Zealand Accessible Graphics Group is pleased to invite you to an open online discussion about Refreshable Graphics Displays. The meeting will provide an opportunity for people who have tried these new devices to share their experiences, and for those who are curious to learn more. We hope you can join us on Thursday 13 February from 4-6pm Melbourne/Sydney time (AEDT). Registrations are required via https://monash.zoom.us/meeting/register/zddsBvmGQnyk-E_gXTJ4vw

In tonight’s final installment of Braillecast Live, we’re delighted to be joined by two further sponsors of our recent World Braille Day event:

At 7:00 PM, Andrew Flatres from HumanWare will bring us up-to-date with the Monarch, Text-To-Speech on the Mantis and much more.

Then after a short break, around 8:30 PM, join Paul Hopkins from All Formats to find out what it’s like to be a blind braille transcriber, and hear more about this social enterprise within QAC.

Register for Braillecast Live.

To join by phone, please use these details:

• Phone number: 0131 460 1196
• Meeting ID: 859 7317 7463
• Passcode: 123456

Friend of the Braillists Paul Hopkins recently wrote a blog post about our recent World Braille Day conference in Worcester. Read it here.

With thanks to All Formats and QAC for being one of the sponsors of the event.

If you attended our recent World Braille Day conference, we hope you found the day valuable and enjoyable. It was wonderful to meet so many of you in person.

We would greatly appreciate your feedback to help us improve our events, and we would like to thank those of you who have completed the form already. Even if you were unable to attend, we still welcome your thoughts, as your input will help shape the direction of future Braillists events. Please take a few moments to complete our feedback survey.

Thank you once again for your support and involvement in the Braillists community. We look forward to hearing your thoughts and seeing you at future events.

The Library of Congress in the US has recently updated its web page on Braille Ready Format.

Among the updates are several references to our masterclass, What is a BRF and Why would you Want One? presented by Matthew Horspool in 2021.

We posted last year about the EBU Braille Working Group’s initiative to post one piece of content a day for Braille200.

Find the contributions here.

We have been asked to share this link about a new publication on braille music.

My name is Fiona and I work at the Helix Centre – a research studio based at Imperial College London. I am doing a project with Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust to understand how they can improve the accessibility of outpatient appointments at their hospitals. We want to hear the experience of people who had appointments at St Mary’s, Charing Cross, Hammersmith, Queen Charlotte’s and Chelsea and the Western Eye Hospitals in the last 12 months and whether we communicated about their appointment in their preferred format.

We are particularly interested in chatting with people whose preferred communication and information format is Braille as we would like to understand how we could improve their outpatient experience. We will be carrying out 1-hour chats either over the phone or in-person to hear their experience and will provide them with a £25 gift voucher for participants.

I have shared below some information about the project that may be helpful.

Project summary:

Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, who run the Western Eye, Charing Cross, Hammersmith, St Mary’s and Queen Charlotte’s and Chelsea hospitals want to improve their outpatient services and how they communicate with patients.

We want to speak with people who had an outpatient appointment at one of our hospitals in the last 12 months and are blind or visually impaired. We would arrange to have a 60-minute chat with you over the phone or in-person to talk about your experience finding out about and attending your outpatient appointment.

You would receive a £25 voucher as a thank you for your time.

If you are interested, please contact us by phone on 07561 873711 or email [email protected] to register your interest.

You can find out more information about the project on the Trust website.

Kind regards,
Fiona O’Driscoll | Policy Fellow (she/her)
Helix Centre, Institute of Global Health Innovation, 3rd Floor, Paterson Building, 20 South Wharf Road, St Mary’s Hospital, London W2 1PE, UK