For over 40 years, volunteers have been meeting weekly in Spencerport and proofreading each other’s braille transcribed work (English to braille). These materials consist of textbooks, chapter books for children, novels, cookbooks, menus, and hymnals to name a few.
Classes are taught beginning each September every Thursday morning at the Spencerport/Gates Ambulance building on Lyell Street in Spencerport.
Any interested residents can sign-up for this approximately 60-hour course running from September-May. Current members of this group, known as The Spencerport Lions Braille Service, number just under 30 and meet weekly in Spencerport from Brockport, Chili, Gates, Greece, Hamlin, Hilton, Rochester, and Spencerport. To date this group has brailled over 700,000 pages.
To get started as a certified braillist register for class and come in and explore whether this is the volunteer work for you. It is not easy and does require a commitment of two hours classroom weekly for nine months, as well as two to three hours of practice daily and one to two hours of homework weekly. The group provides the instructor, the manuals, the braillewritter and paper – volunteers provide the dedication.
Upon completion of the course the transcriber must submit a 35 page manuscript (pages from a book of one’s choice) to the Library of Congress for grading, receive at least an 80, and find a place on their wall to hand the well-deserved certificate of completion.
Volunteers work from home, set their own schedule, receive limitless support and encouragement from the group and immeasurable rewards in knowing they are providing an invaluable service to school children, as well as adult readers, in the immediate area, as well as in places they may never even have heard of and for people they may never meet, but for whom they have opened the world through the written word.
Classes begin on September 18. There is a very nominal cost and a limited number of spaces available. For sign-up and to get more detailed information call either instructor Sue Keegan at (585) 967-6702, or Judy Smith at (585) 392-3153.
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