By Tara Bannow

(Editor’s Note: This article appeared in the Minneapolis Star Tribune on July 26, 2011.)

From the outside, it sounds as if someone is using a jackhammer inside the Golden Valley office of Volunteer Braille Services.

But that noise is actually huge printers — called embossers — tirelessly churning out pages and pages of braille dot coding that the company makes for schools, businesses and individuals.

Volunteer Braille Services (VBS) is the only entity in Minnesota, other than the state government, that takes books and other reading materials and transcribes them into braille. Although the work has remained steady for the 43-year-old company, the fact that fewer blind people are learning braille nowadays is a constant source of frustration.

"It's always been kind of disappointing.... It's a literacy thing," said VBS President Dorothy Worthington. "I know you can get a lot of things on audio and you can have your computer screen read to you, but I'm not an advocate for either."

New technologies, such as a computer program that reads the screen, as well as a shortage of braille-certified teachers, have contributed to the decline.

Blind people who know braille are far more likely to have careers. There is a 70 percent unemployment rate among blind people in the United States, but 90 percent of those who have jobs know braille, said Jennifer Dunnam, president of the National Federation of the Blind of Minnesota.

"This is an issue that we have been having a great focus on for the last number of years," Dunnam said. "We're working hard to get [braille] revitalized."

Spreading the word

Meanwhile, VBS is doing the same, partially by spreading the message about Very Bumpy Stories, its 1,200-book braille library, which includes titles from popular series like Little House on the Prairie and Harry Potter.

"It's set up so they can have the experience of checking the shelves and finding a book," Worthington said.

VBS offers free six-month courses beginning every September for people who want to learn to transcribe text into braille. Students begin learning to transcribe manually on a Perkins Brailler, which looks like an old typewriter, eventually moving to a computer program. Once they've finished the course, people volunteer for VBS by transcribing on their home computers.

The classes take a lot of time, and the few who stick around until the end are those who truly love braille, Worthington said.

"Some people, they love to read and they want to share that with other people," said Worthington, who took her first braille class in 1988. Although she didn't know anyone who was blind, she was interested in learning and wanted to contribute.

VBS's biggest clients are school districts that need textbooks in braille. It's also done everything from church bulletins and restaurant menus to bank statements.

The irony of the decline in braille today is that although fewer people are learning it, there are actually more ways to use it than ever before, Dunnam said. For years, the only other option was to have computer screens read out loud, but now blind people can actually read their screens in braille.

"I can read any number of newspapers in braille every day," Dunnam said. "I could never do that before."

Although VBS has to charge clients so it can purchase materials and host classes, those who run the company are not in it for the money, said VBS coordinator Cindi Laurent.

"We're in it to keep the office open," Laurent said, "so we can continue to provide braille to those people who don't have other options." For more details, go to www.vbsmn.org.