The Braillist Foundation teaches and promotes Braille as a literacy tool for blind and vision impaired people. It has one goal: more Braille! Resilience funding from Fight for Sight supports the charity; this funding aims to help maintain, scale and grow localised, targeted support through services such as this.
Braille has been around for hundreds of years, and people who use it are keen to advocate for the independence and opportunity it brings them.
Braille for Beginners: driving change
Long-time Fight for Sight supporter Charmaine is a Braille advocate. Charmaine lost her vision suddenly in 2018. In 2022, she decided to take up Braille. It is a year she now refers to as ‘that seismically reinvigorating year’. After months of rehabilitation, learning to use a white cane, and the world evolving after the Covid pandemic.
“I learnt Braille with The Braillist Foundation through the Braille for Beginners Course. There are so few forums to learn the basics of Braille, so accessing this course was brilliant.”
Learning Braille has helped Charmaine enjoy the things she loves doing.
“So much needs to change around the societal perceptions of sight loss and what vision impaired people need to thrive beyond mere survival. As someone who adores arts, culture and heritage, having access to literacy in a way I choose to is incredibly important.”
Skills development and ongoing support
Along with the vital beginners' course, The Braillist Foundation hosts online events, courses for more experienced users, master classes, and a "Braille Bar", which are drop-in sessions for people to ask questions about Braille. Not only do their events and sessions showcase using Braille traditionally, but there have also been demonstrations of incorporating Braille in today's technology, for instance, using Braille screen input with iOS.
The organisation is primarily run by blind and vision impaired people such as Matthew Horspool, general manager, whom we sat down with to learn more about why they do what they do and the impact our funding has had.
"Vision impaired people should have the right to know Braille and be taught it," he expressed. "It's up to them whether they want to use it or not.”
Matthew told us how our funding has contributed "enormously" to what they do: "We weren't sure where our next pot of money was going to come from," he said.
"It's quite important to us that where we can, we cover people's expertise, particularly for master classes". He shared that the money from the fund helps maintain admin costs such as running the website and helps to keep the transcripts going, which they enabled for deafblind people.”
"Vision impaired people should have the right to know Braille and be taught it. It's up to them whether they want to use it or not."
More about The Braillist Foundation
To find out more about The Braillist Foundation, visit the Braillist Foundation website.
You can also listen to some recorded sessions through their podcast series, Braillecast.
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