[stylist] Braille for youth or adult contests - info & thought

[Robert Leslie Newman]

Miss Lynda and young Master Vejas and others:


Nope, Braille is only for the youth group. And someday we need to also
include those youth who do not do Braille or do not wish the extra work of
producing two versions of their work. In fact, it is a fairly understood
real life happening, that the blind person who learns Braille and advances
on to an electronic notetaker and or gets a Braille display to be used with
their computer, they stop doing much production of hard-copy materials, and
if they do choose to whip up a hard-copy version of something, they go to a
Braille embosser and crank it out. And this story, is an age old response to
efficiency ---  tell me, do you or any sighted writer that you know, today
hand-write out your work for submission to a contest or publisher?

Yet, don't mistake this- we in the NFB, and specifically the Writers'
Division do want to promote Braille literacy and so we set up the rules for
our youth contest to get at this goal. But alas, by this Braille
requirement, we are excluding all other youth (the majority) from the chance
to work at writing for our contest. Sometime soon, we need to expand our
youth contest to include the non-Braille users, too.


Robert Leslie Newman
Personal Website-
Adjustment To Blindness And Visual impairment
http//www.thoughtprovoker.info
NFB Writers' Division, president
http://www.nfb-writers-division.net 
Chair of the NFB Communications Committee