Adventures in producing Braille for university

It’s very quickly become apparent that I’m going to benefit from having access to hardcopy Braille when studying. This isn’t actually much of a surprise. I find having a copy of a text I’m studying really useful, and there’s something about being able to see it on paper that makes such a difference.

Although I can access digital text using a Braille display, accessing it this way means I can only view one line at a time. This isn’t such a problem if all I want to do is read, but when I want to take a closer look at the text, how it is written, the design of it, seeing it as only a single line that I have to scroll through isn’t very helpful. Being able to emboss it and actually run my fingers over the page gives me a much better idea of things like how long a paragraph is, or whether the author capitalises a word in an unconventional way.

I’m very fortunate that I have access to a Braille embosser. This means that I’m able to emboss some not particularly wonderful copies of the readings I want to do. They aren’t very good because I’m not a transcriber and so there are many people who could produce a much better Braille copy than I could. But that’s not so much of a concern as all I need to do is be able to read it.

Where things get challenging is when I need to read 1 or 2 pages of a longer book. This has been the case in the current topic I’m studying. I have access to the full text of the book in both PDF and epub, but I need to be able to pull out specific pages to emboss. The difficulty is that although I can skip to those pages in the pdf, I can’t copy the text to a word file. But when I convert the PDF to word, I lose the page numbering structure. So that was a problem to solve today.

In the end I managed a rough workaround. I would find the correct page in the pdf, and I would look at the first few words on the page. I would then skip over to my word document and do a search for that string of text. Once I found it, I would go back to the pdf and take a look at the last words on the last page of the extract I needed to read. I would then go back to my word document and start selecting line by line until I found those ending words. I could then copy that chunk of text over to a blank word document which could then be embossed.

If it sounds like an awkward work around, that’s because it is. I would much prefer something that is easy to work with however that isn’t the reality I’m working with right now. I would love to know if other blind people have encountered this problem, and if so, how did you solve it? I’m sure there must be a better way than what I’m doing. Or perhaps I just hope there is!