[blindkid] On the Future of Braille: Thoughts by Radical Braille Advocates (Bookshare)

[melissa R green]

thank you for sharing this Alison.

Blessings,
Melissa Green and PJ
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Twitter: melissa5674
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Goodreads Melissa Green

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Allison Hilliker" <AllisonH at benetech.org>
To: "Blind Kid Mailing List, (for parents of blind children)" 
<blindkid at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Monday, July 15, 2013 12:45 PM
Subject: [blindkid] On the Future of Braille: Thoughts by Radical Braille 
Advocates (Bookshare)



Hi Everyone,

I thought some of you might like to read the below post from the Benetech 
blog. Benetech is the company that runs Bookshare.org. The article 
demonstrates Bookshare's support for Braille access and global literacy.

Best,
Allison

http://benetech.blogspot.com/2013/07/on-future-of-braille-thoughts-by.html

Guest Beneblog by Betsy Beaumon, VP and General Manager, Benetech's Global 
Literacy Program.


Betsy Beaumon
I recently had the honor to speak at the first-ever Braille Summit, hosted 
on June 19-21, 2013 by the National Library Service for the Blind and 
Physically Handicapped (NLS) and Perkins School for the Blind. With the goal 
of promoting braille literacy, this landmark meeting brought together 
braille experts from around the world to Perkins' campus in Watertown, 
Massachusetts.

My biggest takeaway from the summit: the time could not be more urgent, and 
more hopeful, for the future of braille and the prospects of those who need 
it. That's why braille is an important focus for us in Benetech's Global 
Literacy Program - we know that we must keep braille relevant and make it 
more available.

One of the biggest reasons is that among people who are blind, braille 
literacy has been linked with higher education levels, higher likelihood of 
employment and higher income. Accordingly, U.S. federal law supports braille 
instruction. In what is known as the "braille provision," the Individuals 
with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) of 2004 mandates that the teams who 
help write educational plans for students with disabilities presume that all 
blind and visually impaired children should be taught Braille unless it is 
determined to be inappropriate.

What's alarming is that for decades the number of braille users has been on 
the decline. And today, braille is not being taught to most blind children. 
Data from the American Printing House for the Blind's annual registry of 
legally blind students shows that in 2012 only 8.8% of legally blind 
children in public and residential schools used braille as their primary 
reading medium.

Many professionals argue that this decline in braille literacy has led to a 
literacy crisis in the American population of individuals who are blind. 
Community concerns have grown so strong that on June 19, the first day of 
the Braille Summit, the Department of Education Office of Special Education 
and Rehabilitative Services issued new guidance to States and public 
agencies to reaffirm the importance of braille instruction and to clarify 
the circumstances and evaluation requirements under the law.

At Benetech, we agree that braille is an essential literacy tool and that 
every child who needs it has the right to be taught braille. We also know 
that braille materials must be far more available to braille readers of all 
ages in order to realize their full benefits. At the Braille Summit's 
kick-off event, keynote speaker Peter Osborne, Chief Braille Officer for the 
Royal National Institute of Blind People, U.K., argued that we must shift 
from spending on the provision of hard copy braille to the provision of 
refreshable braille and the associated digital file formats to enable people 
to read so much more.

"As organizations," Osborne said, "we must liberate spending to focus on the 
promotion, learning and innovation around braille," and recognize that we 
ought to embrace today's changing economics and technology so that braille 
can be part of an equation which delivers access to information for all, not 
just to those who can afford it.

We strongly support this position and believe the digital content revolution 
holds the best promise for the future of braille. The massive shifts in the 
fields of consumer technology, education, and publishing open the door to 
combating some of the major obstacles to braille availability - high cost 
and time to produce hard copy braille books, as well as difficulties in 
distributing and storing them due to their large size (for example, one 
Harry Potter book in printed braille stands about four feet high). We are 
confident that technology can continue to improve the quality of electronic 
braille such that a blind consumer can expect both immediate AND high 
quality braille on demand.

As we have explained in other Beneblog and Bookshare blog posts, these are 
exciting times for everyone who has been working to meet the imperative to 
provide people with print disabilities equal access to published 
information. The increasing focus on digital content, rather than its 
printed form, and the shift to electronic distribution of ebooks pave new 
avenues for removing the barriers to accessibility. At Benetech, we want to 
ensure that in this brave new world of digital content, braille is as 
available as any other ebook format to those who want it. In this sense, you 
could say that we are radical braille advocates.

With Bookshare, Benetech's online library for people with print 
disabilities, our ebook-based approach to the accessibility challenge has 
already delivered on the promise of ending the famine of accessible books in 
the United States. Now, with the new Marrakech Treaty from the World 
Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), and our hundreds of direct 
publisher relationships, we are poised to help deliver on this promise 
worldwide.

Today Bookshare adds around 3,000 books per month to the collection, with 
our publisher and electronic distribution partners supplying most of these 
books, at the same time as they go to electronic retailers like Amazon. We 
also continue to add books from volunteers, staff and outsourcers through 
scanning and proofing, including student requests. Our commitment to braille 
literacy means that the entire Bookshare collection of over 198,000 titles 
(and counting) is available not only for use in text, audio or the 
combination, played with a wide variety of assistive technology tools, but 
also formatted for use on electronic braille displays.

Granted, due to the limitations of fully automated conversion, this is not 
perfect braille, and we continuously work with experts to improve the 
quality of our Braille Ready Files (in the BRF format). Creating a perfect 
digital braille book, particularly with subjects such as math, still 
requires a great deal of human preparation and is therefore very expensive. 
Our belief is that having hundreds of thousands of solid - if not perfect - 
braille books available to read as soon as they are available to everyone 
else is far better than getting them much later or not at all. The 
convergence of standards in digital publishing and major advancements in 
braille codes - such as the recent adoption of Unified English Braille (UEB) 
format by the Braille Authority of North America - are on our side. This 
allows a much broader group of experts to keep working on the problem. 
Imagine the day when we are ready for UEB launch: the entire Bookshare 
collection will be made available in UEB with a click of a button!

The road toward full access for braille readers has a number of other 
hurdles that must be overcome. One major roadblock is the affordability of 
braille reading tools. The cost of electronic braille displays remains 
prohibitively expensive for most blind people in the world. We believe that 
every reader should be able to have a braille display and we therefore 
support the efforts to bring this cost down, especially for those least able 
to afford it. We are now directly participating in the DAISY Consortium's 
Transforming Braille project, which seeks to dramatically lower the cost of 
braille cell technology, the fundamental technical building block of a 
braille display. This is important here in the U.S., and critical for the 
inclusion and empowerment of people in developing countries.

Another major challenge involves the graphic content in ebooks, such as 
pictures, charts, and diagrams, formulas and special symbols. Images are 
currently omitted altogether in electronic braille formats and require 
extensive human intervention to produce in an accessible, tactile form. In 
response to the need to make accessible images cheaper, better, and more 
cost effective, we created the DIAGRAM Center with funding by the U.S. 
Department of Education Office for Special Education Programs (OSEP). 
Through this R&D Center, we are working to revolutionize the availability of 
accessible images and tactile graphics by targeting standards and developing 
open source tools that help close the gap between what technology can do 
automatically and what requires expert human work.


A 3D graphic test on paper substrate of a circuit diagram.
Image by the National Braille Press, a DIAGRAM subcontract.
We are addressing key questions such as: When is a tactile required? How can 
we make tactiles easier to produce, use and share? And how will changing 
technology impact tactile design, production and use? Against each of these 
questions we are targeting projects on which we collaborate with some of the 
leading experts in the field. DIAGRAM projects include automating a tactile 
graphic decision tree to target the efforts of experts; multiple projects 
around 3D printing as an inexpensive, emerging output format for tactile 
objects; our Poet tool for crowd sourcing image descriptions and MathML; 
tools to read QR codes as labels on tactile graphics to increase available 
information; and work in whole new haptic graphical models for fully 
electronic tactile experiences. We are also actively pursuing legal 
approaches to allow sharing of image descriptions and tactile graphics files 
to reduce costly re-work by underfunded schools and nonprofit 
organizations/NGO's.

We are developing many of these free tools with publishers and content 
creators in mind and in consideration of the online platforms more and more 
people use to author and publish information. As the entire industry is 
changing the ways in which content is produced and as digital content 
becomes increasingly media rich, we want to ensure that all content that is 
born digital is also born accessible. Through intense collaboration, we are 
advancing open tools and standards so that accessibility is built into 
mainstream products.

The future of braille, empowered by innovations in technology, is bright. 
And while the advancement of technology presents new types of challenges for 
accessibility, we at Benetech see them as tremendous opportunities for 
making content truly and universally accessible. New technology will allow 
breakthroughs that will continue moving people who have vision impairments 
toward a better tomorrow. With cooperative and coordinated efforts across 
many communities, we can achieve a future in which new technologies improve 
braille proficiency and life outcomes for braille readers.

Please join us in realizing this "radical" future!

Bookshare is participating at the National Federation of the Blind's 
National Convention in Orlando, Florida on July 1-6, 2013 and at the 
American Council of the Blind's 52nd Annual National Conference & Convention 
in Columbus, Ohio on July 4-12, 2013. We'd love to meet you there!


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