What, you might ask, is an embosser? It's the tactile version of a printer. We send words and images to a printer and it prints them out in toner or ink so we can see it whereas an embosser does the same, only with dots.
The majority of what we'll be using the embosser for will be braille. The embosser, coupled with a sophisticated text to braille translated piece of software gives us the ability to print anything for my daughter in braille. I said sophisticated for the software because converting text into a piece of printed braille is not as simple as you might imagine. I'll spare you the details but it's impressive what the software can do.
Why is this exciting? We already have a braillewriter, what does this do that that doesn't? It's all a matter of source. My daughter (and I) can create braille on her braillewriter. That's us, pressing the keys, one character at a time. We have never been able to print in braille and I can't count the number of times I wanted to.
For instance, you want to make cookies and your child wants to help. We can print the directions so she can tell you what to do next. Emails. Send one to my daughter and I'll emboss it for her so she can read it. Books and anything else she would want to or could benefit from reading we can send to the embosser.
We can, and have, read things to my daughter. We have to because we had no other choice until today. It is going to enable her in many ways. She's already excited about using it. Tonight I printed two short stories my mother-in-law wrote and put a binder on it. It was so fast. In the morning when my daughter wakes up she'll come downstairs and find it at her place.
Now to get into the technical bit of what the braille is in that booklet. I've written about contracted versus uncontracted braille before. Uncontracted has every single word spelled completely out. We can see so much at a glance this doesn't present a problem for us. A blind person has to read every character under the tips of their fingers. Contracted braille takes less space, replacing some letter sequences with shorter "contractions."
There are about 180 contractions she will have to learn to fully read braille. Remember how her braillest at school was formatting the books she was reading at the level she'd progressed to? Now I have that power—I can do that too!
I opened Nana's story file she emailed us into the software used to reformat the text into braille. We need to do this step because sending an alphabetic text file to an embosser that's designed to print braille is not going to get you the output you might have expected. Hence the software which converts the text into braille. There are options you can select to indicate which learning cluster you want to go from. The software then converts the file into learning level appropriate output.
It's going to be an exciting time here while we're in lockdown. Technically next week is my daughter's spring break but we haven't let on yet. It is far easier to keep both children in school or ot of school at the same time and since my son has lots of work assigned by his teacher for next week, we decided to continue school for her in the mornings too. With the new embosser, she's practically looking forward to it.
What Does He Look Like: I'll go into this more later when we've had time to do get up to speed with it, but for tonight, it's picture time. The embosser also prints anything else you want and provides a graphics tool to convert things into printable format. My husband worked on this tonight so my daughter could feel a picture of her brother.
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