Handid Braille Services
Braille Transcription & Printing
Specializing in braille for languages other than English, especially languages that do not use the Latin alphabet.
(We're really good at Unified English Braille too!)
Handid meets all requirements for HIPAA and GDPR security and privacy.
A 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation providing accessible media production and printing services to organizations in support of people who are blind and low vision.
Supporting People Who Are Blind and Low Vision, and The People Who Support Them!
Handid is a US-based 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation with a mission to provide braille and other forms of accessible media to organizations with clients who are blind and low-vision, and individuals who read braille. We work with clients globally on all seven continents.
Handid specializes in braille for languages other than English, especially those that use symbol systems other than the Latin alphabet. (We do English too!)
Handid maintains technologies and processes that meet HIPAA and GDPR regulations for security and privacy.
At Handid, our vision is a world where accessible media is always available. Donations are tax-deductible in the USA, and are applied to reduce or remove costs to our individual clients.
Our current price sheet for ad-hoc braille transcription is located on the "Services" link at the top of this webpage. Large projects and ongoing work qualify for special pricing. Contact Handid for more information.
Click the "Contact Us" link at the top of this webpage, or send an E-mail to info@handid.org to ask about your project, or to request consultation over your and your patron's needs for braille and accessible media.
What is Handid up to?
Don Winiecki, principal at Handid Braille Services, has been appointed by Mark Riccobono, President of the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) to serve on NFB's Committee for the Advancement and Promotion of Braille (CAPB). CAPB's efforts serve to further the mission of NFB and to work toward literacy and independence for individuals with disabling vision loss.
Handid Braille Services has partnered with hotel chains throughout the Mediterranean and Middle East to ensure its documents are available to guests in Unified Arabic Braille and Unified English Braille. Travelers in this historically significant region in human history are now able to enjoy greater independence with braille documents, menus, and guides.
Handid Braille Services has provided braille transcriptions for the New York Public Library that are used in a museum-quality exhibition of the library and its history! If you are in New York, visit the library to experience tactile images and models of the library and accompanying braille.
As a gift to Muslims for the Holy Month of Ramadan, Handid Braille Services has produced a screen reader accessible version of the most recent English translation of the Qur'an, "Clear Quran." This screen reader accessible version includes the English translation and the timeless Arabic text of the Qur'an. Look for it soon at https://blog.clearquran.com/
Handid Braille Services is updating its "rate sheets."
We maintain a stable rate sheet for small and ad-hoc jobs. Please see our ad-hoc rate sheet for details.
If your organization can partner with Handid Braille Services for four or more jobs per month, you will qualify for our "high volume" rate sheet. Please see our high volume rate sheet for details.
Please inquire at info@handid.org or use the "Contact Us" link at the top of this page to inquire about your project.
Handid Braille Services is prototyping a template-driven workflow for organizations that produce a set of common documents that require customizing for each recipient (a.k.a. mail-merge). This workflow will reduce customer costs while enabling increased document production rates for organizations that serve customers with blindness and low vision. Contact us at info@handid.org for more information or to request a consultation about your specific needs.
One of the distinctive offerings of Handid Braille Services is our ability to produce braille in languages that use symbols other than the Latin alphabet. Few other organizations can offer the same range of language services!
Handid Braille Services is increasing the languages for which we can produce braille transcriptions!
Every month, Handid produces braille transcriptions in the following languages:
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified and Traditional)
English
Farsi/Persian
Hebrew
Japanese
Russian
Tagalog
Vietnamese
In addition to the above, over the last month, Handid has produced braille transcriptions into braille codes for the following languages:
Armenian (East and West)
Burmese
French
Hmong
Indonesian
Korean
Laotian
Portuguese
Spanish
Don Winiecki, principal at Handid Braille Services, has been elected to the Board of Directors for the National Braille Association (the "other NBA"). NBA provides guidance and ongoing professional development for braille transcribers and tactile graphics producers. In addition to his duties on the NBA Board of Directors, Don also serves in the following roles:
Chairperson, Tactile Graphics Skills Group
Member, Foreign Language Skills Group
Handid has partnered with Innate Ever Beauty cosmetics to ensure its product line has braille labeling that permits individuals who are blind and low vision to identify and select their products.
Have questions about how someone who is blind or low vision can use cosmetics? Type "blind beauty vlogger" into your search engine and be ready to learn!
Handid has recently received a contract to complete a braille transcription of Japanese language instructional materials for a university in the USA. This contract includes translation of content as well as transcription of content into Japanese braille.
Handid is building capacity to include multilingual translation of your English documents, as well as transcriptions of your translated content.
Handid's tools workflow meets HIPAA and GDPR standards for security and confidentiality at all stages. This ensures protection of privacy for your documents, or organization, and your customers.
Don Winiecki, principal at Handid, has been voted into the Board of Directors for the National Braille Association. The National Braille Association promotes excellence and provides training and ongoing support for braillists across around the world,
Don is currently on the "Foreign Language" committee, where he collaborates to answer questions from braillists on tricky questions they are facing in their work. (He also knows Unified English Braille pretty well!)
Don is the Chairperson of NBA's "tactile graphics" committee.
New contracts include braille in Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Vietnamese, Arabic, Japanese, and English. This work is time-critical, demanding fast production, proofreading, and delivery. Handid meets or beats the deadlines, every time!
These projects also require HIPAA and GDPR compliant security. Handid maintains secure systems across the entire toolchain.Simplified Chinese is the standard in Mainland China and Singapore.
Traditional Chinese is the standard in Taiwan.
We have delivered six volumes of braille for Arabic language students at a major University in the USA. Two of those volumes are shown to the right, ready for packing. All of these volumes will be in students' hands on the first day of class!
Without your donations to reduce the cost, these six volumes would have cost over $35K! Donations allowed us to reduce the cost to a fraction of that, saving the school resources that will be used to support other students with disabilities!
Because Handid is a 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation, 100% of the proceeds from this project are channeled to reduce the cost of braille transcription for other clients! Your donations help us to make sure braille is ready for students when they need it!
Handid meets HIPAA and GDPR standards for privacy, security, and access in all of its processes. We have just learned that this was a principal decision-factor for a current client in selecting to use Handid Braille Services. We were told that other braille producers contacted by the client were unable to meet their requirements. In addition, because Handid uses donations to reduce the cost of producing braille, the client's costs were actually lower than proposed by other vendors, even though they could not meet our very high security standards!
The call for accessibility remediation of office-type documents in DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, and PDF formats is increasing to the point where Handid is adding this to its list of services. Remediation allows these documents to be used by persons using screen-reading software such as JAWS (Job Access With Speech), NVDA (Non-Visual Desktop Access), VoiceOver (iOS), and TalkBack (Android). Adding document remediation to our list of services increases the ability of Handid Braille Services to ensure your customers, clients, patients, and personnel have full access to materials they need!
Just started work on #braille #transcription of another set of #learning materials and books in #English and #Arabic. These are for #students in a #university with a very recognizable name. Excited to be one of very (VERY!) few braille transcribers in the USA who produce in Arabic.
Thanks to personnel at the National Library Service for the #Blind and Print #Disabled in the USA Library of Congress for pointing to the need for braille transcribing in Arabic!Handid has recently completed the accessibility remediation of several thousand documents for a municipality that has a mission to make its documents available to everyone. Accessibility isn't just braille!
Handid Braille Services has received a donation of a ViewPlus SpotDot braille embosser that can both print on the page and overlay braille & tactile graphics. This improves our ability to provide documents that work for braille & print readers at the same time!
Now, print readers and braille readers can work off the same documents collaboratively. Teachers and students, medical professionals and patients, clinicians and clients, government officials and residents, and anyone else will now be able to use documents produced by Handid in a way that includes more people in ways not easily possible before!Handid's Don Winiecki attended meetings of the International Council on English Braille (ICEB) in early June, 2022, to begin work on updating and refining rules for encoding mathematics and other scientific content into braille. Handid participates from beginning to end when it comes to providing braille!
We have begun a project to provide literature in both English and Hebrew braille for an international educational institution.
Handid has produced braille transcriptions of three books for the Tayseer Seminary in Knoxville, TN (USA). These books are about 60% in English and 40% in Arabic. We produced the braille using both Unified English Braille (UEB) and Unified Arabic Braille (UAB).
Handid has also produced braille for health care institutions, educational institutions, cultural institutions, including braille supporting a current exhibition at the Boise Art Museum (BAM) in Boise, ID (USA).
Other clients work with us confidentially in order to ensure that their clients have access to legal, medical, financial, and diplomatic documentation needed to complete their work.
Handid Braille Services uses state of the art disk encryption, firewall, and VPN technologies, and employs policies and technical standards that meet HIPAA and GDPR requirements for confidentiality, integrity, and availability to protect and secure your materials.
Two of six volumes of braille in Arabic and English, ready for shipment to Arabic language students at a major university in the U.S.A.!
An activity board in a Boise, Idaho city park. Handid produced the stainless steel braille plates installed at each tile in the board. (Zoom in to see!)
Why Is Braille Transcription Important?
According to the journal "Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science," in 2020, 49.1 million individuals globally are blind and 33.6 million experience severe visual difficulties [1]. The National Federation of the Blind reports that almost 7.7 million people in the U.S. population experience blindness or low-vision [2].
In the U.S.A., the unemployment rate for non-institutionalized individuals between 21 and 64 years of age who are blind is over 70%. However, braille readers experience a much lower unemployment rate of 44% and report more active participation in their communities [3]. Thus, there is substantial evidence that braille provides a person who is blind or low-vision with skills and opportunities that help them live lives more similar to sighted counterparts than possible for those who do not read braille. This is in part because braille enables an individual to actively study content in detail. This is absolutely essential in mathematics, science, and technology subjects, as it is in even reading the news! It also allows an individual to read at their own pace and to go back and review passages more easily -- all of these are things that print readers do without even thinking, but that can't be done easily using text-to-speech systems.
At Handid, we know rocket scientists, chemists, mathematicians, engineers, and successful and everyday people who are blind and want to be engaged individuals across society, and all of them are very clear that braille is an absolute necessity for their success.
In addition, the "Americans with Disabilities Act" (ADA) provides a legal requirement for certain materials to be produced in braille. These materials include way-finding signage in certain types of buildings, elevator control panels, essential documents, and more. Schools are required to provide braille when it is the "least restrictive" medium for learning.
But more than all of that, braille provides independence and privacy when reading everyday documentation like financial information from your bank, health care information, information from local and national government officials, and more.
Altogether, braille is an essential medium that allows an individual to read all manner of things, including everyday documents like bank statements, insurance forms, medical prescription information, as well as content in guides to State and National Parks (did you know that the U.S. Government provides brochures in braille for all National Parks?), books, magazines, and more!
The National Federation of the Blind also promotes that braille helps individuals to live the lives they want!
[1] Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science
[2] National Federation of the Blind
[3] Journal of Blindness Innovation & Research
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