[Trainer-Talk] braille slates and stylers

[Barbara Johnson]

My best wishes to your brother!  All my resources go to Cameroon, so I can't give right now, but I know how crucial slates and styluses are.  

In case anyone wants to donate, paper and slates in the US are quite different from those used in the rest of the world.  We use 8.5x11-inch paper, but most of the world uses A4, which is a bit longer and wider.  Slates are called handframes, and they have thirty cells per line.  They also take a whole page, rather than the four lines our slates take.  Not knowing all this, I brought some US slates as donations, and they were not well received.  They didn't fit the paper, and no one was used to changing guides.  Even worse, some slates have pins on the top side of the slate, making guide changing that much more awkward.  US slates are better than nothing, though.  

Canada tries to accommodate both worlds.  If you want to donate slates for A4 paper, the Braille Superstore in Vancouver, BC, has them for $19.95 US, with free shipping to the US or Canada:  Being North American, they call them slates.  
http://www.braillebookstore.com/Full--Page-Slate,-A4--Size.1 

Most handframes are plastic, and they come with very faint tabulation dots and line numbers. When I taught spatial math in Cameroon, we used SuperGlue to glue tiny grains of sand where the tabulator dots would be, to make them stand out more.  These sand grains stayed on.  One of the biggest difficulties people have is trying to find their place on a multi-line slate, if you must take both hands away and then return.  Maybe a rice grain could be glued every fourth line, at the head of the line.  

Braille paper as such may be hard to get in Kenya, but card stock from any print shop works well.  A print shop can cut paper to any measurement you like.  To emboss books with DBT, we used 29x28CM, which approximates 11x11.5-inch paper.  For shorter projects we used A4.  

Again, best wishes!
-----Original Message-----
From: Trainer-Talk <trainer-talk-bounces at nfbnet.org> On Behalf Of Robert Sabwami via Trainer-Talk
Sent: Monday, January 20, 2020 9:52 AM
To: trainer-talk <trainer-talk at nfbnet.org>
Cc: Robert Sabwami <robert.jawstec at gmail.com>
Subject: [Trainer-Talk] braille slates and stylers

Hi all,

Kindly allow me to put in a request for braille slates and stylers or any other blindness related resources just in case you have them and you do not use them. This is on behalf of my blind brother Mark Sabwami who has set up a project in western Kenya following his social entrepreneurship training in India. He wants to provide training and support in nonvisual skills including braille and assistive technology. Most of the blind and visually folks in this region have, for decades, been cut off from learning and employment opportunities due to lack of information and resources. Some are literally hidden in their homes for years with no hope for a dignified life. Mark just got started with his first cohort of four students.

You can see his graduation speech during his 2019 graduation ceremony while in India:
Jipange opens doors for the blind in Kitale Kenya | kanthari TALKS
2019 | Mark Sabwami | Kenya – YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFSh2nkcGVo&t=60s

If you wish to partner or find out more about marks project, please visit:
https://www.jipange.org/

Thank you!


--
Robert

~ IT IS ONLY WITH THE HEART THAT ONE CAN SEE RIGHTLY; WHAT IS ESSENTIAL IS INVISIBLE TO THE EYE ~

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