“Is There Much Call for Services Like Yours?”

We were sitting in a translation agency, discussing how Braille could be an important offering for a company committed to diversity in communication. When the conversation turned to the breadth of the agency’s scope, the individual sitting to my right said that they recently had a call for an Italian-to-Turkish translation. There can’t be much call for this in South Wales, but nobody would think of asking such a question when hiring freelance translators. The more unusual the language pairing, the better! There is not much demand for such a pairing, but the demand is specific when it comes. It is immediate; and the money is every bit as lucrative as for any assignment!
Believe it or not, Braille pays, too; and Braille which is thoughtfully presented for ease of access as well as being flawless, is worth paying for.
“But nobody uses Braille any more,” said a ‘knowledgeable’ museum curator. A person with an Ipad might claim that no one uses fountain pens either, but a similar Twitter search two minutes ago showed that one hundred people over the past nine hours had tweeted about fountain pens. Three times as many people were tweeting about Braille; and if you scroll through the array of messages, (some deeply shocking), you’ll become aware very quickly of how much misinformation exists about Braille, from the ill-informed to the offensive. However, there are hundreds of thousands of people who rely on Braille as a primary medium for accessing the written word.
Recent legislation has come into effect in many countries, including countries which are part of the United Kingdom, establishing the legal requirement for both the public and private sectors to provide alternate-format versions of their publications, if asked. Thus it is no longer legal to maintain that Braille cannot be provided because nobody uses it any more. If someone requested a copy of a document on stone tablets, such may not be considered as a viable alternate format, but Braille certainly is. In fact, another quick Google search comparing the interest in “Braille” and “large print” as search terms showed five times as much interest in Braille at that moment. Why would that be if nobody used it any more?
Please read this compelling article on behalf of the Right to read Alliance or as a PDF calling for timely and affordable publications for those who cannot read 10pt font.
It certainly goes a little way toward answering the question: “Is there much call for Braille Transcription service like yours these days?”