By Clyde Noel
Los Altos senior volunteers assemble Braille materials
There are only six raised dots in a Braille cell pattern, numbered 1 through 6. The arrangement of the dots configures the alphabet. The letters are then raised to form the interactive Braille guide. They start in the upper left corner and read down.
Carolyn Card volunteers two days a week to compile sheets of Braille to make textbooks for elementary schools throughout the United States.
“We don’t read Braille with our fingers, we read the sheets with our eyes,” said Card. “We put together math and music books for different schools.”
Card works with about a dozen other volunteers for the Braille Transcription Project of Santa Clara County. The company is headquartered in San Jose, but music and math books are assembled in Los Altos at the Hillview Community Center. The project provides Braille textbooks free to students in Santa Clara County and for cost-only reimbursement to other locations.
Margot McCann, a Los Altos resident, has worked for the project more than 30 years. She originally went to the PTA and asked whether they needed help. Instead she wound up assisting in the education of blind children.
The numerous tasks necessary to produce Braille materials are performed entirely by volunteers. Some spend as little as a morning or afternoon a week; others, like McCann, contribute many more hours every week.
Jane Corcoran has been volunteering to make books for the blind since 1965. She does mathematics textbooks and Braille for Stanford University projects.
Some of the volunteers operate machines, do filing work, assemble Braille volumes or operate a computer. Everything is done on the computer, with the six dots. Whether it’s music or mathematics, it starts with the six keys on the computer.
In addition to the alphabet and numbers, there are about 190 contractions and short-form words that reduce the size of a volume and simplify reading. One type of contraction consists of a single letter, which, when standing alone, represents a common word, such as “b” for but and “h” for have.
The Braille Transcription Project of Santa Clara County is non-profit, incorporated and publicly funded. It depends on corporate and individual contributions for its $20,000 to $30,000 annual budget. Most of the money goes for supplies and utilities. Proofreading and insurance take another 31 percent.
Transcribing a textbook into Braille can be a large task, especially if the book is technical. For example, the 745-page “American Government” is 2,331 pages long in Braille. Roget’s Thesaurus is the size of a tome.
McCann said a transcriber training course is given each year, with weekly 2.5-hour classes. It prepares the student to be conversant with the Braille language and to transcribe literary Braille. This year’s course just started; it ends in June 2003.
The main office is at 101 N. Bascom Ave., San Jose, 95128. The address of the North Branch Office is P.O. Box 326, Los Altos 94022. To volunteer, call 948-0139.
