Braillecast

The Braillists Foundation prides itself on being a grass roots organisation; led by braille users, for braille users and, by extension, by blind people, for blind people.

The Tactile and Technology Literacy Centre, based in Auckland, New Zealand, has a similar mission to the Braillists, and we find out more about them in this episode.

We start this episode in conversation with Maria Stevens, Chair of the Braille Authority of New Zealand Aotearoa Trust. We find out more about the work of BANZAT, the standards it has created and how it is helping to promote braille across New Zealand. We also discover more about the relationship between BANZAT and the Round Table on Information Access for People with Print Disabilities.

Afterwards, we catch up with Chantelle Griffiths, a familiar voice to many Braillecast listeners. She is also a BANZAT trustee and responsible for a new and exciting course to train blind people to become braille transcribers.

Last time on Braillecast, we heard from Ben Clare about the challenges facing Pacific Island countries in terms of access to braille, and Ben's experiences of visiting those countries to deliver training.

One of the larger Pacific Island countries is Samoa, and thanks to a substantial fundraising effort, the Samoa Blind Persons Association were able to send three observers to the eighth General Assembly of the International Council on English Braille, which took place in neighbouring New Zealand at the end of May.

One of those observers was Ari Hazelman, who works as the Disability Inclusive Coordinator at the Association. He spent a few extra days in New Zealand after the General Assembly to find out more about blindness services there, and during a rare break in his busy schedule, he generously agreed to be interviewed for Braillecast.

Australia and New Zealand are the two most well-known countries in the Pacific Region, the area between Australia and Hawaii. The region also includes many other countries including Fiji and Samoa. Many of these countries are on small, remote islands in the Pacific Ocean. They are difficult and expensive to reach, with total populations often of 100,000 or fewer, and ensuring access to braille is very difficult.

Over the next two episodes of Braillecast, we will be finding out more about braille provision in Pacific Island countries. This episode will discuss the challenges they face and the international intervention which is assisting them, and in the next episode, we will hear from a representative from the Samoa Blind Persons Association about the work they are doing to overcome these challenges.

Ben Clare, from Australia, has had a career delivering blindness education in Pacific Island countries for over twenty years. He is President of the Pacific Region of the International Council for Education of People with Visual Impairment (ICEVI), where he also represents South Pacific Educators in Visual Impairment (SPEVI). Prior to this, he spent two years in the Solomon Islands delivering braille training and establishing a Solomon Islands Government Blind Service through The Australian Volunteers Program. His first visit to the Pacific Islands, in 2004, was to deliver screen reader training at a school in Papua New Guinea, through a partnership with the School for the Blind in Sydney. He set off with just a couple of laptops and demo versions of JAWS.

This interview was recorded during the Annual Conference of the Round Table on Information Access for People with Print Disabilities.

Braille isn’t just for books! It can also be found on household products and signs; in restaurants, museums and theatres; and your personal and confidential documents can also be sent to you in braille. So how do you find it? Who do you ask? And if you think the braille you’ve found could be improved, how do you make your case without upsetting people?

In this special event for World Braille Day, we were joined by a panel of braille advocates to explore these questions and more. We examined when companies are legally required to provide braille, discussed how to encourage the provision of braille and considered how best to respond when braille is not available.

On the panel:

Do you need an easy way to identify your shampoo from your hair removal cream? Do you want to avoid accidentally feeding dog food to your dinner guests—again? Does your granddaughter complain that you’ve covered up the print label on her favourite midnight snack with your “special dots”?

Our sense of touch can give us much more information about our environment than we may think. Naturally, there’s braille, but how else can we use this powerful tactile sense to make things easier at home and further afield?

In this Masterclass, Matthew Horspool and Chantelle Griffiths joined forces to take you on a tactile journey to help you master your sense of touch for the simple, yet powerful purpose of identification and marking.

They covered:

Whether you’re newer to sight loss or blind since birth, there’s something here for everyone. Join us to learn how to level up your tactile marking skills, and create unforgettable experiences for yourself and others, for all the right reasons.

This session, presented by Saima Akhtar, is designed to give you a Whistlestop tour of the fundamentals of Arabic braille. Rest assured, it’s not nearly as complicated as you think. By the end of the session, you will have more insight into the following areas:

Please note, it will be much easier to follow along if you have a grasp of grade one English braille as Saima will refer to similarities between English and Arabic braille throughout the session.

Many braille displays include an SD or Micro SD card slot. However, when it comes to purchasing a suitable card, there are so many options! Which is best, and which work with your braille display?

In this session, we were joined by friend of the Braillists Ben Mustill-Rose to help make sense of them. He covered:

According to its website, “BrailleBlaster™ is a braille transcription program developed by the American Printing House for the Blind to help transcribers provide blind students with braille textbooks on the first day of class.” It uses markup from source documents to automate formatting, and provides “tools to make advanced tasks quicker and easier.”

Although it is “Designed primarily for editing textbooks that meet the specifications published by the Braille Authority of North America,” the adoption of Unified English Braile in most English-speaking countries makes it suitable for use in a wide variety of applications in many parts of the world. It is free of charge and compatible with virtually all braille embossers.

On Tuesday 20 February 2024, we were delighted to be joined by two representatives from APH to introduce us to BrailleBlaster and demonstrate some of its features:

Sometimes, you just need a BRF file with no fuss, even though you know it might have the occasional error or won’t be formatted quite as you’d like.

RoboBraille is one solution to this problem. It works with a large variety of file formats including PDF, Microsoft Word and plain text, and converts them to braille within a matter of minutes. Best of all, it’s entirely online, so you don’t need to install anything. You can use it on computers even if you don’t have admin rights, smartphones, tablets and even braille notetakers.

Join us in this episode to find out: