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posted by martyb on Thursday November 02 2017, @03:30AM   Printer-friendly
from the BraileToSpeech++ dept.

A Kindle for the Blind:

For nearly a century, the National Braille Press has churned out millions of pages of Braille books and magazines a year, providing a window on the world for generations of blind people.

But as it turns 90 this year, the Boston-based printing press and other advocates of the tactile writing system are wrestling with how to address record low Braille literacy.

Roughly 13 percent of U.S. blind students were considered Braille readers in a 2016 survey by the American Printing House for the Blind, another major Braille publisher, located in Louisville, Kentucky. That number has steadily dropped from around 30 percent in 1974, the first year the organization started asking the question.

Brian Mac Donald, president of the National Braille Press, says the modern blind community needs easier and more affordable ways to access the writing system developed in the 1800s by French teacher Louis Braille.

For the National Braille Press and its 1960-era Heidelberg presses, that has meant developing and launching its own electronic Braille reader last year—the B2G .

Hope it catches on. We need somebody who can read the last copy of the Bible after the apocalypse.


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  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday November 02 2017, @05:49AM

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Thursday November 02 2017, @05:49AM (#590894) Homepage
    Braille that's created specifically for readability by the blind can be replaced by eTexts that are created specifically for the blind (where this preparation might be as simple as "Save As - Plain Text", for example). Compare apples to apples, please, the fact that the world's gone bananas doesn't mean apples can no longer be made.
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