Welcome to the Nation's Blind Podcast, presented by the National Federation of the Blind, the transformative membership and advocacy organization of Blind Americans. Live the life you want.
Anil Lewis: All right! Welcome to the Nation's Blind Podcast of the National Federation of the Blind. This is Anil Lewis, and unfortunately, my regular co-host Melissa Riccobono can't join us today. But fortunately, for all of our listeners, I'm joined by Mr. Chris Danielsen. Hey Chris.
How are you doing?
Chris Danielsen: I'm doing great, Anil. How are you?
Anil Lewis: I'm doing quite well, my friend. Good that you're in the copilot seat. I'm looking forward to a wonderful podcast with you on a wonderful topic.
Chris Danielsen: Absolutely. I mean, we always love to talk about Braille in the National Federation.
Anil Lewis: Oh, is that the topic? Cool. Thanks for letting me know.
Chris Danielsen: Yeah! [Laughs]
Anil Lewis: Let's talk about Braille. That's a great idea.
Chris Danielsen: Well, Braille is really important and we like to talk about it a lot, and we have a particular reason for talking about it today, but we'll get to that in a minute. I always feel really fortunate, and I know not everybody is as fortunate, because I was able to learn Braille at a very young age, started learning Braille in kindergarten. So now I still enjoy using Braille. I use it every day now and have for a long time. I feel like it's a critical skill. It makes me, in my particular role doing public relations, it makes me so much more effective as a writer in order to be able to proofread my own stuff and engage with different content. So I'm really grateful for Braille.
Anil Lewis: Yeah, and I agree I'm at that place now, but I have to admit, I wasn't in the beginning. So I lost my sight of course, I was 25 years old and I learned how to use access technology and Braille wasn't necessarily emphasized in my training, but luckily the members of the National Federation of the Blind really expressed to me the importance of becoming Braille literate. And I'm thankful every day that they did. It was more difficult, I guess, than I thought. But in retrospect, it wasn't more difficult than me learning how to read print back when I was in elementary or kindergarten, et cetera.
So it was and has been a significant learning that has been extremely helpful in my progression. Not only just work and academics, but as you said, enjoyment. Reading for enjoyment I think is something that many blind people should really enjoy. So because the National Federation of the Blind really knows the importance of Braille, we continue to try to facilitate learning and engaging people about being encouraged to read and learn to read Braille. And with our partners at the American Action Fund, we're very pleased to be promoting our Braille Readers Are Leaders program. And our guest today will be Lisamaria, who is the project manager for Our Braille Readers Are Leaders. How are you doing there, Lisamaria?
Music: Braille is beautiful! [sung, then music stops]
Lisamaria Martinez: Hello, how are you?
Anil Lewis: I'm doing great. I'm getting to co-host with Chris Danielsen! It doesn't get any better than that! And you are our guest!
Lisamaria Martinez: That is awesome. I'm really excited to be here today. Yes, yes, yes.
Anil Lewis: So can you tell our listeners a little bit about the Braille Readers Are Leaders program?
Lisamaria Martinez: Absolutely. Braille Readers Are Leaders is a program that's near and dear to my heart because a long, long time ago-
Anil Lewis: Isn't that a song, [singing] a long, long time ago? [Laughter] I'm sorry.
Lisamaria Martinez: When people believed the earth was flat. [Laughter] No, when I was a little girl, I had a teacher of the visually impaired encourage me to participate in the Braille Readers Are Leaders contest because she knew how much I loved to read, and maybe I might've had a little bit of a competitive streak in me back then.
Anil Lewis: No! [Laughter]
Lisamaria Martinez: And she encouraged me to join. In the '80s, Braille Readers Are Leaders counted pages completed, and for seven-year-olds, I read the most and won my category. I read 2,081 pages in three months.
Anil Lewis: Oh my goodness.
Lisamaria Martinez: Fast-forward all these decades, and the Braille Readers Are Leaders contest is a little different. It includes all ages and adults, all Braille readers of any level, and instead of pages read, to be more equitable, it's minutes read. So that really brings in those Braille learners who are new to Braille and may not be fluently reading to be competitive with page counts.
Anil Lewis: Sure. Let's back up a little bit. Many of our listeners may not even remember or know how the program used to work. Let's talk fundamentally about the program. So individuals, when they participate, they commit to doing what?
Lisamaria Martinez: So they commit to reading Braille for three months, or actually it used to be three months, I'm sorry. This year, the contest starts December 4th and ends January 22nd, 2024. And during that time, people are signing up to read Braille and in any shape and form they get their fingers on and see how long you do it.
Anil Lewis: So they get to choose what they read, what Braille content?
Lisamaria Martinez: They get to choose what they want to read and what method they read it in, whether it's hardcopy, Braille display, just count your minutes and log them on Beanstack. We're using a program called or platform called Beanstack to register folks and keep track of how many minutes you read.
Anil Lewis: So as I read, if I start at nine o'clock and I read until ten, I'll mark that time as an hour worth of reading in my Beanstack data?
Lisamaria Martinez: Yes. Yes.
Anil Lewis: Okay. That sounds simple enough.
Lisamaria Martinez: Yes. Yes. Registration is open and folks can sign up through December 4th when the contest starts.
Anil Lewis: Nice.
Chris Danielsen: Can I just talk about a minute why this is important? So like with anything, a lot of people, especially if they're learning Braille, the big thing is practice. So having a really focused time to practice reading Braille, even I being totally blind, I was a little resistant to reading Braille because it wasn't easy to do it first, but my mom made sure that I sat down every day and read a certain amount of Braille. But this is a good activity, right, because it allows people to be competitive and have some fun with it, but at the same time, it builds that practice time and no matter what their reading speed is or their fluency, if they read for a certain number of minutes and have an incentive to do that, then they will practice more. Is that kind of the idea that we're-
Anil Lewis: And they'll get better.
Chris Danielsen: And they'll get better. Is that the kind of the idea we're going for?
Lisamaria Martinez: Yeah. And we are also giving out prizes as incentives to keep reading.
Anil Lewis: Hey! That's all right!
Lisamaria Martinez: All right. And yeah, what I love about Braille Readers Are Leaders 2023/2024 is exactly what you said, Chris, that folks can practice their Braille and there isn't this pressure to read a certain amount of pages, but try to practice in your way and hopefully have fun doing it. So it goes from that spectrum of Braille reader to the other end where you might have people like you, Chris or me, who grew up reading Braille and Braille is a part of our lives and perhaps because of work and other life things, adulting, we may not be able to sit down and enjoy reading as much. And I think this contest gives us the ability to sit down for a little bit and remember what it was like to really enjoy reading.
Anil Lewis: And there's something really powerful about getting the Braille underneath your fingers. Because we can listen to books and I listen to books and I enjoy listening to books, but it's something about reading and I've been doing more and more on that. And I'm glad that we're adding the refreshable Braille display as an option. It's something about reading that is not only just settling, but it also allows me to retain information better. I ve found that when I'm reading something in Braille, I can recall more specifically, especially data. And then of course it also enhances my ability to understand how certain words are spelled because the more and more words that are introduced into the vocabulary, the more difficult it is to actually use the old-school way of sounding out phonetically to spell something correctly. So Braille has a really positive impact in my ability to retain information as well.
Lisamaria Martinez: There's a lot of words out there these days that look nothing like the way you think they should because they've got capital letters in the middle and punctuation signs in places that never ... [laughs] They weren't there before.
Chris Danielsen: And even I enjoy reading NFB-Newsline content on my refreshable Braille display now because there are so many names in the news and names of not only people, but different parts of the world and just different pieces that you pick up. Even the names of companies, because the names of companies, even if they sound like regular words, they're sometimes spelled creatively. The names of ... I used to get, and I still read sometimes Rolling Stone Magazine in Braille, and the band names are really unusual sometimes. And so just keeping track of all that, I can't remember when I learned, but it was because of Braille. I mean, a lot of people are Beatles fans. I'm a Beatles fan, but I didn't know how Beatles was spelled for a long time until I saw it in Braille.
Lisamaria Martinez: There you go.
Chris Danielsen: Because it's not like the insect, it's the beat-les, B-E-A-T.
Lisamaria Martinez: Right. Right.
Anil Lewis: I didn't know that until now, so I haven't read those magazines, so yeah, that's-
Lisamaria Martinez: You should go read.
Anil Lewis: Yeah, exactly.
Chris Danielsen: Yeah, exactly.
Anil Lewis: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Expand my genre. But you've made a good point. So if I sign up for Braille Readers Are Leaders, when I go through my morning ritual of reading the various papers I do through the National Federation of the Blind Newsline service, I can count that as part of my Braille Readers Are Leaders time?
Lisamaria Martinez: Yes.
Anil Lewis: Oh, outstanding. Outstanding.
Chris Danielsen: You can become more well-informed. Well, I'm sure you're curious, and I'm sure everybody wants to know what they can win and how they can get involved. And so we'll talk about that right after this brief message.
Announcer: For over one hundred years, the American Action Fund for Blind Children and Adults has provided programs and services to the blind and deafblind, mostly without cost and always with an emphasis on Braille. Thousands of Braille books and Braille calendars sent and thousands more blind and deafblind people to reach. Help the American Action Fund by contributing today at actionfund.org/donate. Thank you for your support.
Chris Danielsen: Okay. And so now we're back with the real LMM, Lisamaria Martinez. [Lisamaria laughs] Everybody else thinks LMM is Lin-Manuel Miranda, but we know it's our own Lisamaria Martinez.
Lisamaria Martinez: No, no, no. Although we do come from the same island. [laughter]
Chris Danielsen: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
Anil Lewis: Well done, well done.
Lisamaria Martinez: So we're talking about how to get started, right? With Braille Readers?
Anil Lewis: Absolutely. So how do I sign up?
Lisamaria Martinez: Well, first you've got to register. So everybody who is interested in joining needs to go to actionfund.org to sign up for Braille Readers Are Leaders, and remember, registration is open and the start date of the contest is December 4th. So you want to hurry up and go to actionfund.org and fill out your information, your category, all of that good stuff is right there. If there's any troubles with signing up, you can always email us. Our information is right there on the webpage. And then December 4th, start reading.
Anil Lewis: Nice. We are using this Beanstack that people can get access to, continue to log their information, and that's all they really need to do?
Lisamaria Martinez: Right, is just log your time, I believe. Beanstack is a little new to me. We have been using it for the contest for a couple of years, but it's new to me, so I'm learning with everyone else.
Anil Lewis: Okay, sounds good. And then at the end of the contest, all that data will be aggregated and we'll make some decisions on who wins the wonderful prizes.
Lisamaria Martinez: That is correct.
Chris Danielsen: And so what are those wonderful prizes? [Lisamaria laughs like a comic book villain, then all laugh]
Anil Lewis: That s more of a diabolical laugh. Are these going to be prank prizes? What?
Lisamaria Martinez: That is to be announced.
Anil Lewis: Oh. It's a cliff-hanger.
Lisamaria Martinez: I could tell you that in previous years we've had really fun gadgets for the youth. We've had junior science experiment kits.
Anil Lewis: Nice.
Lisamaria Martinez: We've had bead boards, magnetic bead boards, which everybody loves. I have my own and my kids fight over it. We've had some really cool prizes in the past. And of course the more minutes you log in, the more interesting the prizes will be. So we're working on some top prizes which happen to be top secret at the moment.
Anil Lewis: Top secret prizes. Come on, Lisamaria, you can tell Chris and I. We won't tell anyone. We promise. [Laughter]
Chris Danielsen: That's right. Nobody's listening.
Lisamaria Martinez: Big hug.
Anil Lewis: Yeah, this isn't even live yet. Come on. Very nice. Very nice. Well, I agree. I think that the prizes in the past have been pretty phenomenal and I'm hoping that we can continue to do that. So that's going to be great. I just wanted to revisit again to make it even more poignant. I love the fact that this is a contest and it's a fun way of encouraging people to read Braille, but I also think it's important to remember and be motivated to understand that Braille really opens up avenues for blind people that otherwise would not exist. I mean, the data that I always like to share whenever I talk about Braille is everybody talks about there's a seventy percent unemployment rate of blind people, which is outrageous. But of those thirty percent of blind people that are employed, ninety percent of them know Braille, which in my opinion is a direct correlation between Braille and gainful employment.
So Braille is an essential tool for quality of life for blind individuals. It provides access to information in a way that's uniquely beneficial to blind individuals that otherwise, I'm not going to say it's not available, but it's not as easily and readily obtained through some of the other spaces. I've had some of my friends that say, "Well, I can spell using my speech technology." Absolutely right. You can spell through each and every character of the word if you choose, but running your fingers across a word is much more, in my opinion, easier, especially once you become proficient. And also, as I said earlier, it allows me to retain that information better. So really want to encourage people to recognize the true benefit of Braille.
Chris Danielsen: Absolutely. We don't want to make people feel bad if they don't know Braille and if they haven't had an opportunity to learn it yet. But at the same time, think of it as another tool to add to your toolbox. It definitely does have benefits. I think about the benefit of retaining information. I think about the benefit of reading things like poetry. Poetry is very cool to hear read aloud, but to me, to really interact with a poem, it's really important to see it on the page and see how it's laid out. So there's all that kind of thing. Anything like mathematical content, and with the new Braille code, the unified English Braille code, it's more and more easy to understand how print is laid out and to learn about that process.
Anil Lewis: Formatting.
Chris Danielsen: Formatting and all that stuff. As you learn Braille and when to use parentheses and when to use brackets and all these different things, it really is an important skill that can really add to people's toolbox. Lisamaria, do you want to add anything to all that?
Lisamaria Martinez: I do. I want to say let's just bring it to everyday life. Even if you don't ever sit down and read a novel in Braille, you can label things and think about how overwhelming it is to open 20 different spices to find your smoked paprika. If you just Braille label your spices.
Anil Lewis: There you go.
Lisamaria Martinez: You don't have to open 20 of them to find the right one. I make my own lotions and beauty products, and I deal with a lot of essential oils, and there's just no way I can open a hundred bottles to figure out which one is the correct one. Right. So again, Braille labels really, really help in very practical situations.
Anil Lewis: Very nice. Lisamaria, I don't think we captured, how did you, and when did you learn Braille?
Lisamaria Martinez: Yeah, so I learned in the first grade when I started to be mainstreamed in school and Braille was my only option. I couldn't see anything back then. And so it was just a given that this is the way I was going to read, and I've always had a love for books. So practicing Braille was never an issue. It was more like getting the books out of my hand so I could do my other homework was the issue. Also going to bed. My mom tells stories that she would stand in my bedroom door at 1:30 in the morning and just wait to hear the page flip of a book that I was reading under the blankets to tell me to go to bed. [Laughter]
Chris Danielsen: See, this is one advantage. This is one advantage of reading Braille, right? You can read in the dark.
Lisamaria Martinez: Under the blankets.
Chris Danielsen: My parents used to do the same thing and I would flip the page and, busted!
Anil Lewis: Wow. And now you have refreshable Braille displays, so as long as that action is not so loud, you might be able to read as long, but they may hear the keys clicking.
Chris Danielsen: Right, right.
Lisamaria Martinez: That's right.
Chris Danielsen: Exactly. So yeah, it really is an amazing thing. I had the same problem once I got to where I was pretty fluent in reading Braille, you couldn't stop me and I wanted to read all the time, and there's nothing like having, as much as I love my refreshable Braille display, I still like to sometimes have the big Braille book.
Anil Lewis: Read that hardcopy Braille.
Lisamaria Martinez: Hardcopy. Yes, yes, yes.
Chris Danielsen: Yeah, exactly.
Anil Lewis: I always equate that to people who still love to read the printed newspaper. It is just something comfortable about it. And I agree with you. One of the things you touched on earlier too, Chris, is how when you learned to read and got more proficient, you really started enjoying it. That was the hard part for me, getting over that Braille hump. Learning how to read it was just a struggle in the beginning, and it just seemed like I could never really figure out and decode those Braille dots underneath my fingertips. But at one point, and I don't remember exactly when it was, but thank God for Jerry Whittle, who was my Braille instructor at the Louisiana Center for the Blind at the time, who continued to tell me, Just read, just push on through it, read. And at one point I, again, don't remember when, but it was while I was at the Louisiana Center, reading became easy and it actually became fun. Being able to interpret it and understand-
Lisamaria Martinez: You stopped thinking about it.
Anil Lewis: I guess that's what it is. It became rote or habit or whatever you want to call it, but you're absolutely right. So I encourage people, as we were talking about earlier, to participate in the Braille Readers Are Leaders program, because it can provide that degree of learning and practice that will help you if you're at that point where you're trying to get over that Braille hump, get to the point where you actually enjoy reading Braille as well. So I encourage everyone who's listening to this show to join yourselves and encourage your friends and family members to join. We told you how, visit actionfund.org, and I'm looking forward to competing for those surprise prizes. [Laughter] Well, thanks Lisamaria for joining us.
Chris Danielsen: Absolutely.
Lisamaria Martinez: You are very welcome.
Chris Danielsen: It has been such a pleasure to have you, the real LMM right here on the Nation's Blind Podcast.
Anil Lewis: Until next time, remember, you can live the life you want.
Chris Danielsen: Blindness is not what holds you back.
Announcer: We'd love your feedback. Email [email protected] or call 410-659-9314, extension 2444.