Dale Gasteiger
Braille Institute
If you want to know what it is about, Dots Are Not All There Is to Braille, I have copies of our children's magazine that we give out every year. It's condensed and it doesn't have any Braille in it except for the part that says Dots Not All There Is to Braille, today. Please pick one up before you leave. It also has the illustrations that we put into that magazine for the children that are in tactile form.
How the Braille Institute got into tactile business happened about two and a half or three years ago, when somebody from HowTek came and showed us their pixel master and what it could do. We thought we'd like to try one. At that same time we got a contract from the State of California, Department of Education to do their geography books. We thought this would be a great idea to try and put tactile graphics maps into the textbooks at the same time we were producing the braille. We did this with some moderate success. We got mixed reactions for it. Some people thought it was great, some people thought it was terrible, and some people had no opinion.
It did have it's shortcomings. It was very labor intensive. It took us a long time to do it--very slow in production. It took us over a year to get the whole series of books out, just by doing it with graphics. We could probably put out about four maps an hour, based on the way the thing was set up, which was too long. So, I looked around for another alternative.
I come from a background in the printing business and I have a friend back in Pennsylvania and I was telling him my problem. And he said, "well, we have something that might work." He asked me to come see it and I went to see it. It was a plate that they used in the production of computer paper produced by BASF, plate manufacturers. It's an ## plate and it's photo sensitive. It's starts out all the color of orange. What we do is expose the plate, and when we expose the plate with a negative we get an image. We wash the plate off and that's how we start the work out to make the Braille copy.
This year for California we are doing a science series for grades kindergarten through eighth. [ Shows examples.] This one has a piano keyboard in the book and from that we went to the computer and we made our own drawing of it. After we got the drawing made, we had a negative made. Then we pasted the negative up. From that negative, we burnt and washed the plate. From that plate, we wound up with an embossed copy. With this process what we found is, we can not only emboss paper, we're able to emboss plastic--plastic covers and things like that. We even can emboss our zinc plates, and make our zinc plates the same way.
We've also gone to the process now of trying to add print. This we did this for Los Angeles' metro rail system. What we did is put in Braille and in print, the information in English and, on the back side, it's in Spanish, and there's a diagram of the metro rail system. We also have done this in other books--this is the eye we took out of this book. It is the same setup. We take the drawing and put it into the computer. We redraw it or whatever we have to do. Some of them we scan, some of them are very easy to scan. We do the same thing with maps or whatever it is. That's the whole process and this is where we're headed with this sort of thing. We're going somewhat down the same road, you might say, as the American Printing House and the other outfits, but we're trying to put it in the textbook right away. That's our whole system.