News and Views
Thank you, City of Edinburgh Lions Club, Jim and John
National Braille Week, 4-10 Jan 2009
Lothiansound has been offering CDs to listeners for one whole year now. The uptake at the beginning was slow but we now have over 100 listeners preferring the crisper, clean sound of the digital production. We are only able to offer this option with thanks to our sound engineers who work hard behind the scenes. Thank you!
We are looking for volunteers with some experience in digital recording and editing (mostly evenings).
Also, our Committee would appreciate help from an enthusiastic fundraiser.
If you are interested in either of these volunteer opportunites, please e-mail: info@lothiansound.org.uk or telephone: 0131-661-2850.
It is amazing how many visually impaired people don't know about Talking Newspapers!
What can you do?
If you are a Lothiansound volunteer, take some Lothiansound publicity leaflets to your Optician, Doctor's surgery, library or anywhere you think would attract the attention of new listeners, or their families. If you are a visitor to this site but would like some publicity leaflets to be sent to your organisation, please e-mail info@lothiansound.org.uk.
If you are a member of a club/association, please consider hosting a talk about Talking Newspapers. For further information, please e-mail: info@lothiansound.org.uk
ThankThank you, City of Edinburgh Lions Club, Jim and John
During a copying session
recently, Jim and John discovered a fault in one of the CD copying units. John
investigated the problem and removed the faulty part. Jim sourced and fitted
a new unit. The Lions Club paid the bill. Thank you all. What a team!
National Braille Week, 4-10 Jan 2009
Louis Braille was born near Paris on 4 January 1809. As the result of an accident when he was three years old, he developed an eye infection and lost his sight.
Having spent years experimenting with ways to make an alphabet that could be read with the fingertips, he invented the six-dot Braille system when he was only fifteen years of age. Braille's system, which uses raised dots to represent the letters of the alphabet, is still the standard form of writing and reading used by blind people throughout the world today. Since Braille is a code, not a language, it can be used to translate many spoken languages.
To mark the bicentenary of the birth of Louis Braille, Ian Rankin, well-known crime writer and author of the Rebus books, launched a campaign on behalf of Royal Blind, calling on writers, publishers and booksellers to make more books available to the visually impaired. Coinciding with National Braille Week, Mr Rankin, whose son is a pupil at the Royal Blind School in Edinburgh, saw a Braille passage from his bestselling novel Fleshmarket Close pinned to the walls of the actual street in Edinburgh.
The Royal Blind hope this campaign will raise awareness and gain support for Braille. An appeal has been made for help to raise £2 million in order to re-house the Scottish Braille Press. To mark the appeal, the Press is printing a Braille version of Rankin's novel, Death is Not the End and the author will visit the Press to see the first copies.
If you would like to learn more about the Scottish Braille Press, please visit www.royalblind.org/sbp/
Donations to the campaign
can be made via the National Braille Week website at www.nationalbrailleweek.org
or by calling 0300 321 0000.