[NFBMI-Talk] braille transcribing

Georgia Kitchen gkitchen at sero.email
Wed Jun 26 13:33:24 UTC 2019


Hi all,

Ed Nelson,  a long time newsline  volunteer sent  along this article.
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Female inmates joining Michigan prison Braille transcribers
By JAMES DAVID DICKSONJune 10, 2019
DETROIT (AP) — For her role in her daughter’s death in 2012, April 
Foster is spending the rest of her life in prison.

The 38-year-old’s hope is that her work transcribing Braille will make 
those days count — and offer a measure of redemption.

“I want to do something that my family can be proud of,” Foster told 
The Detroit News. “When you have a life sentence, it makes you lose a 
lot of hope.”

Foster is among about two dozen inmates at the Huron Valley 
Correctional Facility who are learning to transcribe Braille and foster 
literacy in the blind community. It’s the first time that female 
prisoners in Michigan have joined the program, which has been active in 
state prisons since the 1960s.

The inclusion of the state’s only women’s prison into the Michigan 
Braille Transcribing Fund program comes as volunteer groups who used to 
produce Braille — usually stay-at-home mothers of blind children — 
retire from the practice and are not often replaced by younger volunteers.

Over the last several months, about two dozen inmates at Huron Valley 
have spent their days and nights learning the rudiments of Braille. 
Their time is split between classroom instruction and practicing on 
their own time in their cells.

Once certified, the women will join 35 counterparts at the G. Robert 
Cotton Correctional Facility in Jackson in producing millions of pages 
of Braille per year, including school textbooks, maps, menus and 
tactile graphics.

“It’s like learning an entirely new language,” said Tashiena Combs, 43, 
who has spent the last 20 years in prison after a murder conviction in 
Oakland County.

After spending eight years mentoring in a substance abuse treatment 
program and six working in the law library, Combs was intrigued by the 
opportunity to learn Braille. It hasn’t been easy.

Working on a six-key Braille machine, she’s learned that even minor 
mistakes can be costly.

“You can’t correct mistakes on the Brailler we have now,” Combs said. 
“If you make one mistake on the page, you have to start all the way 
over. It has to be as close to perfect as possible.”

At the Cotton facility, the Braille program works out of a 
self-contained building on the prison grounds. At Huron Valley come 
November, the Braille program will be part of the state’s third 
Vocational Village site, alongside programs offering certifications in 
building trades and carpentry, commercial truck driving, 3D printing 
and robotics, and cosmetology, among others.

“Many of the prisoners would tell you it’s a way to not only obtain the 
skill but also to give back,” said Shawn Brewer, warden at Huron 
Valley. Brewer sits on the board of the nonprofit and shepherded the 
expansion effort.

The idea had been broached years earlier but was denied. When Brewer 
became warden of Huron Valley in 2017, he decided the time was right.

Prison headcounts have dropped considerably in Michigan over the years, 
with the 38,415 inmates as of mid-May down more than 13,000 from the 
high water mark of 51,554 in March 2007. Department of Corrections 
officials attribute that to programs designed to teach the skills and 
mindsets that leave former inmates ready to rejoin the real world — and 
the job market — once their debts to society are paid.

Officially, the Michigan Braille Transcribing Fund started work in 
1962. But a Detroit News story on the program from May 1965 placed its 
genesis years earlier.

“The program was started in 1959 by a prisoner who subsequently was 
freed, but who taught others the value of contributing before he left,” 
according to The News’ report. The prisoner’s name was never mentioned 
and has been lost to history. Back then, Lions Clubs in the Jackson 
area would send prisoners the paper they used to transcribe.

These days, the nonprofit earns hundreds of thousands in revenues 
annually. Per its 2017 tax forms, the fund has just shy of $5 million 
in assets. Those revenues fund all program operations; the fund itself 
receives no taxpayer money, said Cindy Olmstead, CEO of the Michigan 
Braille Transcribing Fund.

“Anybody can purchase our work,” Olmstead said. “We sell nationwide as 
well as abroad. We have customers in Canada and Mexico. In the past, we 
have sold to Guam.”

The fund’s catalog of books is itself 1,000 pages. Among its most 
important works are Braille versions of school textbooks.

The Michigan Department of Education’s Low Incidence Outreach office is 
a sign of the changing times for the blind in Michigan.

Successor to the long-shuttered Michigan School for the Blind, a 
state-run boarding school that suffered dwindling enrollment, Low 
Incidence Outreach works with school districts and families to make 
sure blind and hearing-impaired students have the resources they need 
for academic success, including Braille textbooks.

“That’s (822 blind) students who don’t have a school to go to,” said 
Roxanne Balfour, interim director of the low incidence outreach office. 
“They are immersed in the general (education) population. We felt this 
was better, that they would benefit from being with a general population.”

But that means those students, ideally, would start each school year 
with the same textbooks their sighted peers use. To do that, the state 
starts ordering Braille transcribed books in October for the next year.

The education department has a network of some 27 Braille transcribers, 
including the prison Braille programs in Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana, 
which each count as one contract. All told, prisoners crank out between 
20% and 30% of the state’s demand for Braille textbooks.

Once a book has been successfully transcribed, it becomes part of the 
department’s library, and copies are available for a much cheaper price 
than the original transcription. But the nature of textbooks is that 
new editions are released all the time.

“As long as the publisher is putting out books, and school districts 
are buying them for their sighted peers, we will produce them in 
Braille for our alternative needs students,” said Robert Beaton, a 
department of education staffer who works with Braille contractors and 
proofreads Braille.

The National Library Service, at the Library of Congress, has been 
certifying Braille transcribers since 1919.

“People die, leave or don’t do it anymore, so it’d be hard to say 
exactly how many are certified,” said Tamara Rorie, Braille development 
officer for the Library of Congress.

Since 2007, the certification program is administered by the National 
Federation of the Blind, and about 3,500 people have earned their 
Literary Braille certifications since, said Jennifer Dunnam, manager of 
Braille programs for the federation.

Literary Braille is the basic, beginner certification. Others, such as 
Nemeth (math and science), music, and foreign languages, require much 
more training.

The literary Braille certification consists of 19 lessons, which 
progress in difficulty and build on one another. The final element is a 
35-page transcript. A score of 80 or above is required to obtain the 
literary Braille certification.

Mistakes are graded harshly. The standard, experts say, is to deliver a 
document that is equal to what a sighted person would have. If a word 
is spelled wrong on the print page, it needs to be spelled the same way 
on the Braille page. If a comma seems misplaced on the print page, the 
transcriber is not permitted to make a judgment call. Where the author 
placed the comma is where the comma must go.

The women at Huron Valley, still working toward their certificates, 
describe the work as demanding. At the moment, they’re using old-school 
technology rather than computers.

The work is meaningful to inmates like Foster, of Detroit.

In March 2012, she abandoned her two daughters at an urgent care in 
Flint while the younger girl, 6, was sick with pneumonia. She died that 
night, and Foster received a life sentence for felony murder.

Learning Braille, she said, has been a worthy challenge.

“It’s very, very complicated,” Foster said. “These blind people have to 
be geniuses.”

Anyone, in prison or out, can take learn Braille, as the lessons are 
freely available online.

But, Dunnam said, many who start the training learn within three or 
four lessons that it’s not for them.

Mark Coleman, a 25-year veteran of the Braille program at the Cotton 
prison, said it takes new hires about a week to know whether they’re 
cut out for the work.

“If you don’t go back and close your eyes at night and see dots, and if 
you don’t try to read those dots in your mind, it’s not for you,” 
Coleman said. “You won’t get it. It won’t click.”

Coleman, 65, has been incarcerated since November 1981, when he was 
pulled over while driving the car of a slain man, Dr. Lee James English 
of Utica.

At the time, and on the witness stand at his trial, Coleman tried to 
blame English’s death on another man, whose existence was never proved. 
Decades later, Coleman admits to his actions, which will keep him 
imprisoned the rest of his life.

“I’m in here for a murder that I did commit,” Coleman said during a 
recent Detroit News visit to the Cotton facility. “I’m not proud of it, 
but it happened and I accept it.”

Prior to joining the Braille program, Coleman worked in prison legal 
aid but decided he needed a change. Swinging mops was not an option. He 
needed a challenge.

“The whole joy of the work is who we’re serving,” Coleman said. “To not 
only give back to somebody who really needs it but to give them a 
product that’s first-class.”

Jayma Hawkins, director of the American Printing House for the Blind’s 
National Prison Braille Network, said Michigan’s program is one of 40 
in America.

All told, about 1,000 prisoners in America transcribe Braille. Some are 
paid, as in Michigan, where participants can earn up to $4,000 in a 
year. Others are considered volunteers and are unpaid.

Decades ago, it was parents of blind children, usually stay-at-home 
mothers, who learned to transcribe Braille and did it for free to meet 
the needs of their child, or children in the community. But as those 
groups have tailed off over the years, prisoners have picked up the slack.

“Younger people coming up now, they can’t really afford to volunteer,” 
Hawkins said. “Everybody has to have a job.”

Some prison programs, including the one in Michigan, connect prisoners 
who return to society with the materials needed to set up shop, which 
can be expensive.

“We provide them with the equipment, we provide them with the work and 
we modify their pay scale” to make it equivalent with fair-market 
prices, Olmstead said.

While prisoners can earn up to $4,000 a year in Michigan transcribing 
Braille, private Braille transcribers can earn much more.

Those resources are offered so that a skill learned over years of 
practice is not lost, allowing the ex-inmate to continue earning a living.

“Braille is important because it provides literacy,” said Library of 
Congress’ Rorie, who is blind. “You can use technology, you can use 
audio, and most people who read Braille do. We use all the means by 
which we can gain information. But when you read Braille, it’s going to 
improve your ability to spell. Being employed is directly related to 
being able to read Braille.”

Seventy percent of blind people are unemployed, per the National 
Federation of the Blind. But 90% of blind people who do have jobs can 
read Braille.

“The idea that Braille is on the decline, or is a dying art, it’s 
frustrating,” said Dunnam, of the federation. “We want to make sure 
people have high expectations for people who are blind.”

___

Information from: The Detroit News, http://detnews.com/

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