Over the past year my life has been dramatically changed. I was hired by a non-profit called Michigan Braille Transcribing Fund (MBTF).

I went through a 20 lesson course through the Library of Congress to receive my literary certification and I did it in record time for my company (six months).

With that, I am certified to transcribe literature materials such as novels, plays, comics, etc. I then went through Braille Format training which is 22 chapters/lessons and that teaches you how to transcribe textbooks and everything that you could come across in various print formats.

This is including but not limited to History, Social Studies and English textbooks; grade levels vary per customer. I then went to Braille Tactile Graphic training, which is graphics we reproduce inside textbooks like maps, atlases, bar graphs, pie charts, Cartesian graphs in math equations (algebra) and much more. I have yet to learn how to transcribe mathematics, which has its own lessons and code book. As of now, all of the code books I am current on are as follows:

  • Literary Braille Manual
  • Unified English Braille Rules (UEB)
  • The Principles of Braille Formats (textbooks)
  • The Guidelines and Standard for Tactile Graphics
  • Braille 2000 (Braille transcribing software)
  • CorelDraw (graphics software)
  • Omni (“zoning” software)
  • Foxit Reader (PDF)
  • Microsoft Word

I know some people may know or use some of these softwares at home and are thinking that they’re not Braille softwares, such as CorelDraw. We snip whichever photo we need to reproduce for our PDF and paste it into Corel and create our graphic from there. We use ten shades of black, gray, and white to draw, but those shades are only for the transcriber to see the shades really represent different heights, the darker the shade the higher the dots are raised or more predominate they are. Our embosser looks like a printer on steroids. It reads the colors as height values and embosses on braille page just as a printer would do.

I know I keep going on about this which nobody may care, but I really love my job.

So, this has undoubtedly consumed my life over the past year and it’s been crazy so I apologize for my absence. I’m trying to get my career set up and steady and now that it is, I will be posting again as regularly as possible.

I may soon have some big news from the Michigan Supreme Court so stay tuned. Until next time take care of yourselves!