Links to Braille, Audio, and Machine-readable Literature Resources.
In 1981, a friend handed me a folio produced by the American Printing House for the Blind, with the rudiments of grade 2 Braille, also known as literary or contracted Braille. The idea is that by the use of contractions for common letter-configurations, the reader of braille, which is slow to puzzle out for the fastest reader, would be able to move through the cognates more quickly, or as Rebecca Maxwell, the creator of BUOC, says, to grasp more in each fingerful.
Why Braille? Given the state of audio technology, who should bother with it? Most Braille users are folks who have been blind from birth or a young age; adults who become blind seldom take the time to learn it. As a photon-dependent volunteer reader and braillist, I've both heard about and witnessesd the difference that an added edge of a literacy of one's own makes. And because language systems of all kinds fascinate me, Braille will always continue to be one of my modes of writing.
Here, then, are a bunch of resources to those who might be interested in delving further:
Triangle Braille Services Brochure and website.
The American Printing House for the Blind, Inc.
1839 Frankfort Avenue
Mailing Address: P.O. Box 6085
Louisville, KY 40206-0085 U.S.A.
Phone: 502-895-2405
Toll Free Customer Service: 800-223-1839 (U.S. and
Canada)
Fax: 502-899-2274
National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (NLS), Library of Congress. NLS administers a free library program of braille and recorded materials circulated to eligible borrowers through a network of cooperating libraries. Think of these general holdings as about the size and scope of a small-town Carnegie Library, well spread-out.
Recordings for Blind and Dyslexic (RFB&D). is the nation's educational library for people with print disabilities. They have a 77,000-title library of taped textbooks, reference and professional materials for people who cannot read standard print because of (any) disability. Access to RFB&D is by a paid membership fee - either institutional (schools will buy access for all their students) or individual. They also keep a pretty good links page to organizations of interest.
Louis index of recordings and braille books by various agencies and organizations. At last, someone (APH, above, bless their hearts) is putting together a compendium listing the offerings in braille and recorded formats that a bunch of agencies and private organizations have made available in past years. If you are involved with such an agency or group, go get listed!
Project Gutenberg has been putting copyright-free texts into machine-readable format since 1971 (that's before the that genius Kurzweil started playing with photocopiers to invent OCR technology...)
National Braille Press is a nonprofit braille printing and publishing house established in 1927.
Glue Braille Dots as a school teaching activity: Okay, blind folks have been using glue-dots braille for tactile labeling on the stove and suchlike for years - Elmer's Glue now has a web-page, and there I found a teacher's suggestion page includes a classroom activity to teach braille (their scanned photo uses their colored glues), and the excellent suggtion about asking a blind person to come in as a guest speaker to the classroom.
Learning Braille:
Learning Grade 2 Braille: among the best resources I've found online to date is here
An online self-paced course in Braille is available here - there is currently no instructor support, but the full materials are freely available to anyone self-motivated and interested in learning Braille, or in becoming a certified transcriber. However one learns, becoming a certified Braille transcriber is based on submitting a hand-transcribed manuscript of 35 pages to the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, the production of which of course entails learning and applying Braille.
As the Braille through Remote learning (BRL) site reports, "One respondent offered an interesting "characteristic" of the successful transcriber: she suggested that the best transcribers are those who have a sense of "outrage" that blind kids are often prevented from taking courses with their sighted peers due to lack of braille textbook availability. She suggested that her motivation for serving for 30-plus years as a volunteer was the clearly defined need for quality braille materials."