Laurabelle’s Blog

I have started brailling again. I stopped because I was moving to California, and then I didn’t start again because I was tired from my new job or because I was planning my wedding. A week before the latter event, the WTBBL called and said I should either do some work for them or give the software license key back. I said I’d start up again after the wedding, and I did.

I completed the first assignment over the first weekend I had it, but the second took me a while to find the time (really, the energy). I started on Monday and am now three-quarters done.

I have also recommenced knitting. I took a hiatus for quite a while because I simply felt uninspired. I was uninspired by the yarn in my stash, mostly left-over or speculative purchases, and I didn’t feel that I could afford to buy new yarn. I saw the exotic fibers my co-workers brought in and felt scornful of my own plain wool.

In the summer I bought a load of Blue Sky Cotton and knitted what I call Jeff’s go-faster sweater. After that I bought a lot of other yarn for little Christmas projects (and a couple of bigger gift projects too). I am finished with most of my planned Christmas projects and am looking forward to starting on other things.

I was tired for a long time—a fatigue that sleep never seemed entirely to solve. I have begun to sleep more effectively, perhaps—not necessarily to sleep better but to feel better after sleep. For a while I came home exhausted after work, took a nap, and then couldn’t sleep for half the night. I am trying not to do that any more.

Maybe my hobbies are helping too. I felt like I only had time to work, eat, and sleep, but now that I am making time for myself and my interests, especially brailling now, I feel like I am using myself and my time to a fuller extent. I am living my life, not the other way around. As I am so fond of saying, there’s not enough of it to waste.

The first line of my current braille transcription assignment (Colder Than Ice by David Patneaude, chapters 2 and 3):

Two of you? Ms. Murphy, young and dark-haired, met them at the classroom door, wearing a smile.

Is it just me, or does that read more like schoolteacher porn than a kids’ book? Bad choice of phrase, perhaps.

As a braille transcriber, I find Bookshare.org very interesting. Unlike the NLS and other braille libraries, Bookshare.org charges yearly membership fees and does not guarantee the quality of its books. Whereas every braille book I help to produce is transcribed by hand, Bookshare.org books are scanned. This means that they are not as perfect as they could be, but still they are better than nothing. As the Bookshare.org site explains,

Many of these publications will be carefully proofread, providing high quality full text, with structure and audio. The great majority, however, will simply be scanned books, redistributed in a digital format. Compared to investing three hours to scan a book, as each of thousands of disabled people do daily, the opportunity to instantly get a book equal in quality to a personal OCR scan will lower a major barrier to access.

Bookshare.org is not trying to replace the services of organizations that produce very high-quality books. They are merely trying to be better than nothing. Those who do not own a scanner can benefit from those who do, and even those who can scan their own books will share the labor of scanning.

It's good to see people tackling a problem with multiple solutions. When you can have at most two out of three of good, cheap, and fast, not everyone should pick the same two.

(Link via LibrarianInBlack.)

While I was in cataloging class yesterday, it occurred to me that descriptive cataloging is very similar to braille transcription in some ways. Specifically, both are attempts to translate documents into a form which is accessible in ways unlike the original. In both cases, the creator or creators of the original document were most likely blissfully unaware of the implications of their fancy type-setting.

I'm still learning braille. It's kind of weird, because it took 2-3 weeks to learn the alphabet and punctuation, but 4 months later we're still learning contractions! Luckily I think we've only got one more lesson on contractions, and then we can move on to something else. I won't bore you with an exposition on braille, but I do want to show you a choice sample from my homework:

In print, that reads like this:

  11. One of the outstanding characters in the play is a
typical man of the world who reads braille.

Am I the only one who thinks that's a tremendous oxymoron: typical and reads braille?

Braille is cool, and it's not actually very hard, but I think it is making me dyslexic, since it's so easy to mistake one sign for its mirror image when reading. (I read braille visually, not by touch, especially since these days we're brailling on the computer and printing out simulated braille rather than the raised stuff that blind people can actually read.) I think I'm getting pretty good at producing braille though, and when I know the rules well and have gotten in some practice, I intend to try for transcriber certification.

Yesterday I took a rough draft of my homework on the bus to proofread, and finally someone asked what it was! I've been doing this for ages and have been continually surprised that no one was curious enough to say anything. I guess people are just so accustomed to avoiding contact with other people in public places. And this time I was surprised at myself, because I didn't know how much to explain to her. I just said it was braille, which seemed kind of unresponsive to me, but there wasn't much more to say without getting into geekery.

And now I must finish proofreading my braille before tomorrow morning.