Author: Matthew Horspool

Over recent months, The Braillists Foundation has increased activity on social media.  You might have seen some of our posts.  We have also significantly increased the number of people engaging with us. 

If you are amongst our new likers and followers, thank you and welcome.  If you are still thinking about it, why not make that click?

Why should you follow our social media if you are already receiving our newsletter?

We keep looking for Braille news from other organisations that won’t make it to the regular email and share this through our social media.  We also use these outlets to contact those who are not yet part of our community.  By liking our channels and by liking and sharing our posts, the word about Braille reaches a larger audience, increasing awareness that Braille is still important in our world and encouraging more people to use more Braille in more ways.

We will continue to publish Braillists news on the newsletter, so you aren’t going to miss anything important.  But it would be great to have you along to tell the wider world that Braille matters.

To find us, search for The Braillists Foundation on your chosen Facebook application.  On Twitter, we are @braillists.  We look forward to seeing you on either or both platforms.

Hello and happy new year!

It was wonderful to see so many attendees at our first event of the year, a celebration of World Braille Day. I would like to extend my thanks to our excellent panelists, Saima Akhtar, Fred Reid and Gary O’Donoghue for giving up their time to speak with us. If you weren’t able to attend the event, a recording of it can be found on our media page, which you can access at the following link: https://braillists.org/media

We also put together a small audio presentation, sharing the voices and perspectives of braille users from around the world. It was played during the event, however you can also listen to it at this link: https://www.braillists.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/World-Braille-Day.mp3

The Braillists Foundation will continue to keep the community connected during the year, and I hope that together we can all have a wonderful 2021.

Regular readers will be aware that, after a very successful first intake over the past few months, we will be restarting our Braille For Beginners programme on Monday 11 January 2021.

In a change to our usual procedures, if you would like to join us for this new course, you will be required to register. This is to enable us to more accurately anticipate participant numbers and more easily communicate with participants if we need to. The course is completely free and the only personal information requested on the registration form is a name and email address.
All course sessions will use the same meeting information, so you only need to register once, and late registrations are permitted. You should receive a confirmation email upon registering – please retain this for your records as it contains the link to join each session.

We are setting up a discussion group for course participants. Membership of this group is completely optional and you can choose whether you would like to be part of it when you register. However, we highly recommend that you opt in if you can, as it will enable you to share resources and information with other participants and communicate with the course leader outside Zoom sessions.

If you would prefer to participate in the course by telephone, you should still register if you can. The meeting ID and Zoom telephone number will be emailed to you upon registration and you can then join by phone in the usual way. However, if registration is particularly challenging, please email [email protected] and we will provide further assistance.

Like last time, our curriculum will follow the Fingerprint course. This is a well-established programme designed specifically for adults who are learning to read and write braille by touch for the first time. For the best experience, we highly recommend that you purchase a set of the course books from RNIB. They cost £39.00 exclusive of VAT and can be purchased by calling the RNIB Helpline on 0303 123 9999 and quoting product code TC21439. Alternatively, if you are comfortable with online shopping, they can be purchased here: https://shop.rnib.org.uk/fingerprint-contracted-braille-course-volumes-1-to-11?TC21439

If you live outside the UK and wish to purchase Fingerprint, please email [email protected] to discuss international orders. Please note that Fingerprint is only available in hard copy; RNIB does not currently make versions available in electronic formats such as BRF, Microsoft Word or PDF.

If you are unable to purchase Fingerprint, you are still very welcome to join us. We may be able to make alternative resources available in the new year which, although not as comprehensive as Fingerprint, will still be sufficient for course participation. Please email [email protected] if you would be interested in these.

Finally, a reminder that sessions will be every Monday from 7:00 PM in the UK (2:00 PM US Eastern time), starting on 11 January 2021. They will last for an hour and there will be twelve sessions in total, so the final session will be on 29 March. It is anticipated that this will give sufficient time for participants to learn the alphabet, common punctuation signs and some contractions. Self-study resources are available from RNIB to facilitate completion of Fingerprint, and further information will be provided at the end of the course.

We hope you will be able to join us.

To register for Braille For Beginners, please fill out the form at this URL: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZAsfu-ppjwvGteUgYHNMNSvhxseX3y8DOjh

We are pleased to share the news that we are relaunching our popular Braille for Beginners course in January. This will give those of you who missed out on participating in our first course a chance to join us and learn braille. The course will take place over 12 weeks, starting on Monday the 11th of January at 7 PM. The course is free to attend for all participants, however we do require you to register.

Registration gives us a clear indication of numbers, enabling us to produce participant resources. It is also used to add you to the course discussion group, so that you can communicate and share resources with other participants and your instructor outside of class time.

If you’re unable to register and need further assistance, please email [email protected] and one of our team will assist you.

Register for Braille for Beginners at: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZAsfu-ppjwvGteUgYHNMNSvhxseX3y8DOjh

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!

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.