World Braille Day

  Introduction  In common with sighted people, the blind during the last fifty years have enjoyed a continuously increasing range of benefits which have come from the rapid and often bewildering advances in scientific knowledge that have been made in less than a normal life-time. Not the least of these benefits is the increasing volume and variety of braille literature which is becoming available through the development and increasing use of automated methods of production. But while it is highly desirable that this search for yet more efficient ways or producing p books should continue, it is surely no less desirable ( that thought should be given to devising ways of making braille a more satisfying and a more easily accessible ( reading medium. Studies already completed or now under way emphasise the need for a critical review of current methods of teaching braille reading and of the rationale for them. The purpose of this short paper is to describe briefly the research that...

  Introduction  The Nederlandsche Blindenbibliotheek (Dutch Library for the Blind) has been lending books to the blind since 1895. We started off with braille books only. In 1958 talking books on open-reel tapes were introduced and the number of readers increased rapidly. Nowadays we mainly lend talking books on compact cassettes. The talking book on compact cassette is by far the easiest to use and especially many elderly people benefitted from it. Since we introduced the compact cassette in 1972 the lending figures raised from 0.6 million to 2.2 million in 1978. Evidently this rapid growth imposed great changes on our library. In the early days a team of a few people registered the books in the catalogue, lent them to the blind and put them back on the shelves when they were returned. At the moment three departments are in charge of all this: The catalogue department registers books in the catalogue and selects books to be added to our collection. The lending department sele...