Each Friday the Instructional Materials Center Team will provide answers to questions asked by educators throughout the week in the IMC FAQ Friday post. We hope these are helpful as schools place orders for students who need accessible educational materials.
Here is a question we received recently:
If our school has an embosser and the book is available from Bookshare, can we emboss and use it instead of requesting one in Athena?
Yes and no; there are some things to be aware of before choosing Bookshare as the source of your braille books.
Let’s start with different versions available on Bookshare. For each book in Bookshare, there are two versions for braille: Refreshable Display and Embossable Braille. The Refreshable Display format is intended for use on electronic braille displays. These files generally have page numbers and extra blank lines removed for ease of reading on these devices. If you intend on embossing a physical copy, Embossable Braille is the version you would want to ensure is downloaded.
Now let’s take a look at formatting. You will find that not all braille books on Bookshare are created following the Rules of Unified English Braille or Braille Formats. The improper use of headings, continuous print page numbers, and incorrect special characters are some of the more common errors seen. For chapter books, these errors are fewer and less detrimental to the braille reader, but for textbooks it can make the book unusable. Without proper formatting, it creates confusion within the educational material.
A final thing to keep in mind is the size of braille books from Bookshare. On average, a high school level chapter book is 500 braille pages, which would need to be volumized into two or three volumes. Bookshare braille files are not transcribed with volumes in mind. This adds additional difficulties when embossing physical copies of these books as there is no clear place to separate the material. Typically, this requires modification in the file before embossing and volumizing.
Questions? Contact IMC Staff at imclibrary@blind.state.ia.us or 515-281-1323.
The IMC Team will provide answers to the questions we have received during the week in our FAQ Friday posts. We hope these are helpful!
