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PA organization shares the importance of braille literacy, as technology emerges

  • Asia Tabb
Photo courtesy of Asia Tabb.

Photo courtesy of Asia Tabb.

Aired; January 15th, 2025.

World Braille Day celebrates the awareness of the importance of Braille as a means of communication for people who are blind or visually impaired. Vision Resources of Central Pennsylvania has been providing services to people with vision impairment for more than 100 years.

The organization offers support to the communities in Cumberland, Dauphin, Franklin, and Perry Counties. Cheryl Cuddy, CEO of Vision Resources of Central PA, has been involved with the agency for 20 years.

“I have family members with low vision diseases that stole their vision. So, I became more and more involved and had a hand in starting our eye clinic and in our low vision center and did a lot of community relations, events, fundraising, and this position became available, “said Cuddy.

Londa Peterson is the Access Technology Specialist at Vision Resources of Central PA. Being blind herself, she wanted to make a difference for other people living with visual impairments.

“A lot of the particular challenges that I had, and that made me very passionate about it and about what it could do and its potential for people to successfully get through school, to successfully get a job, and maybe to do it with fewer challenges, with needing less help from sighted individuals to get things done, “said Peterson.

Since college, Londa has been invested in learning about ways technology would compliment the use of Braille. She now uses a device that has the keys of a keyboard of a Braille keyboard.

“So now they are actually working on displays that can do multi-line and can-do graphics raised up so that blind people can participate more fully in science, technology, engineering and math, also called Stem and anything else that’s graphical. So, Braille is. Not really changing with technology, but technology is making use of Braille, “said Peterson.

Even though technology is emerging, Londa says for the visually impaired, braille literacy is extremely important.

“Not everything can be done easily with technology and audio labels, for instance. It’s much easier to run your finger over a Braille label on something just like it is to look at a print label rather than have to have a device find where the barcode is or find the digital label that you put on something or the NFC tag, whatever you’re using, “said Peterson.

 

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