News

The Braillists Foundation is planning a celebration for World Braille Day, taking place on Monday January the 4th 2021. We are putting together an audio presentation showcasing all the ways blind people find braille valuable today.

We would love for you to contribute your voice to this if you feel that braille has enhanced your life.

We are requesting audio clips, of no more than 15 seconds, sharing why braille is important to you. You could include:

• A braille-related memory.
• How you use braille in your daily life.
• Why you feel braille matters.

Please email these clips to [email protected] no later than Friday December the 18th at 5 PM GMT.

More information about our celebration event to come!

The Braillists will be pausing events over the Christmas period, starting on the 19th of December, finishing on the 3rd of January.

Please note all of the free equipment has now been taken, and due to constraints in our funding we are unable to obtain more equipment at this time. We have retained the information below for historical interest and will update our website if more equipment becomes available in future.

We are very excited to be offering free Braille reading, writing and learning equipment to Braillists newsletter subscribers and master-class attendees based in the UK or Ireland.

Below is a list of what can be sent. We hope this will help you follow along with our master-classes and to practice Braille in your own time:

• An A4 Braille frame.
• A pocket interline record card Braille frame (the Janus).
• A stylus.
• Samples of A4 Braille paper.
• Samples of 5×3″ index record cards.
• An 8-cell Braille word forming block (for learners).
• A tactile abacus.

There are limited stocks. Therefore please let us know if you don’t want any of the above when you apply so we can reserve them for people who will benefit from them. If you don’t specify we will send one of everything we still have available.

To apply please write in to [email protected] or telephone +4420 3893 3392 with the following information. We also encourage people to apply on behalf of others who may benefit where they cannot apply themselves:

1. Confirm that you or the recipient are subscribed to the Braillists newsletter.
2. Confirm that you or the recipient are interested in attending our Braille master-classes. These can be attended by telephone or Zoom.
3. Confirm the British or Irish postal address to receive the equipment, including postcode.
4. Confirm that this equipment will not be resold.
5. Confirm that you or the recipient are happy to donate it to another Braille reader when/if it is no longer of any use to you (or post it back to the Braillists).
6. Tell us if you don’t want any of the above items.

For data protection reasons your address will only be held by our partner, Vision Through Sound and will not be seen by other Braillists members. If you are not from the UK or Ireland then you can ask on the email forum (https://www.braillists.org/forum/) for advice on similar resources in your country.

We’re delighted to announce that our partner organisation, Vision Through Sound, has been selected to take part in the Co-op Local Community Fund in the UK. They will be using any money donated by Co-Op members to supporting blind people with accessible mobile phones. Vision Through Sound also work on the Canute project and are distributing the Braillists’ equipment. The more Co-Op members who select them, the more funds they’ll receive:
https://membership.coop.co.uk/causes/55082

The Braillists Foundation is newly active on both Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/braillistsfoundation) and Twitter (https://twitter.com/braillists).

We’re sharing news and stories and invite anyone with an interest in Braille to join the conversation.

You can also find us on our email forum (https://www.braillists.org/forum/) of course, where over 200 members discuss all things Braille and tactile media related.

Please note that Clever Cooking sessions are now run by sight loss charity Look UK and that from the 30th of September future Braillists newsletters will no longer advertise this event. If you’d like to continue to receive adverts for the sessions containing the session’s topic and joining instructions please email Elin on [email protected].

Thanks to everyone who completed our survey. We are currently reviewing the data we received and will publish a summary of the results and our future direction of travel once we’ve completed our analysis!

We are also pleased to announce that the winner of the survey was announced last Friday. They won a £10 Amazon gift voucher.

We’d like to thank everyone in our community for your support over the last few months. We’ve been blown away by the response to our Zoom calls, and have genuinely loved arranging them.

We have a number of small index card sized Janus interline slate and stylus (hand frame) sets available for £5 each. If you’d like to order one, please contact [email protected].

Whether you’d like to join a book club, talk more about Braille, or take part in a virtual pub quiz, we’d love to hear your ideas for how the Braillists can best support you over the coming weeks and months. With that in mind, we’ve created a survey to help us better understand the needs of our audience. You can take the survey at https://forms.gle/CkZfBLdNWHgEsSGh9

The form should take less than ten minutes to complete. As a way of saying thank you, if you complete the survey, we will enter you into a raffle to win a £10 Amazon gift voucher. The survey will close two weeks from now on Thursday the 14th of May. We will draw the winner on Friday the 15th and announce it during that evening’s Zoom call.

Several Braillists members are collaborating on a project to create LibLouis tables for the indigenous South African languages. This will have various empowering use-cases, including:

• Making tables available for free or low cost translation software, to prepare materials in indigenous languages to be read on the new low cost Braille displays coming onto the market
• Having tables for indigenous languages included in NVDA, to facilitate Braille output of text in these languages, for which synthetic speech is not available in some cases
• Enabling grade II Braille input into NVDA in these languages

Laurent, who organises the London Braillists meetings, will be posting more on their endeavours on the forum as the project progresses – so sign up if you would like to have this news and other Braille discussion delivered straight to your inbox.