For nearly 30 years, Judith Furse has been running her own braille producing business. Her introduction to braille began at an early age after losing her sight, and she remains extremely passionate about braille to this day. A valued member of UKAAF’s Editorial Working Group, it was great to hear about her journey and perspective in the July UKAAF webinar.
The conversation starts all the way back in Judith’s childhood: in 1967, as she explains, the joy of reading was snatched away from her when her sight status changed for ever. Luckily, after a period trapped at home, she was able to get into an appropriate educational setting and discovered braille. As she rather movingly says, “I just fell upon braille; this was going to give me the ability to read again, so I had a huge incentive to learn it. I just took to it like a duck to water.”
After sharing the thrill of starting to grasp reading via this great new medium and the delight of finding authors like Enid Blyton and E. M. Nesbit via school and The National Library, Judith outlines how quickly braille opened up the wider world of learning for her.
Soon, as she tells us, she was starting to then try and find her way in the world of work. This eventually solidified into teaching and then professionally proofreading braille for RNIB’s publishing arm. Soon this became successful freelance self-employment as a transcriber, which she still does some of—recently being a bit shocked by how much Maths has changed via proofreading of SATS papers (“That’s been a real eye-opener!”).
Some changes better than others?
Roger then asks her about her views on how braille has changed in the years she’s been engaged with it, including the new typeform indicators and some of the more complex aspects of today’s braille software. “Some changes have perhaps been better than others,” she says, frankly. “I don’t like some of the changes and don’t like Unified English Braille,” she adds. “However, it is here with us, so you just have to get on with it.”
Nonetheless, she remains a fan. “Whatever gets people into braille is good, and I would be happy with that,” she declares, before turning to answer some attendee questions, including how people react to her use of it in public (such as church). “I’ve done talks with Brownies and Scouts and so on, and I think children particularly love it–they just find it really fascinating,” she says.
After answering other interesting queries, such as if she ever has storage problems with large quantities of hard copy braille and if she prefers hard copy or digital when she reads for pleasure (we’ll make you listen to the webinar to find out the answer!), this highly interesting and very human and often very honest conversation about braille and where it is these days comes to a satisfying end.
Please check it out—and if you are now ‘hooked’ on the UKAAF webinars, please put a date in your diary for the August one, when Roger will be joined by Sophie Randall from the Patient Information Forum.
* The webinar is now available on our YouTube channel, along with the previous webinars. Please go here to access all of them for free—and if you hit the ‘Subscribe’ button, you will get an automated alert on when the next webinar has dropped
Webinar Transcripts: PDF, DOCX, BRF
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