Products for the Blind

About 600,000 Americans are legally blind, according to the American Foundation for the Blind. Individuals are classified as legally blind, which entitles them to certain tax preferences and other benefits, when they can see objects no more than 20 feet away. Normally sighted persons can see at 200 feet.

Only 10% of the legally blind are totally blind; most have some vision. Another 2.5 million Americans are visually impaired, which means they are unable to read ordinary-size print.

Blindness is most often found among older people. More than half of the legally blind individuals in the United States are 65 and over, according to the American Foundation for the Blind.

The Braille Institute in Los Angeles serves the largest concentration of blind and visually impaired people in the United States: More than 37,000 blind and another 120,000 visually impaired individuals live in Southern California.

The nonprofit institute--which provides training, education and counseling services to the blind and visually impaired--was founded in 1919 by J. Robert Atkinson, a blind mechanical engineer who converted a standard printing press to print the raised dots that form Braille.

Housed originally in Atkinson’s garage, the Braille Institute now boasts a block-long, campus-like headquarters in Los Angeles, five regional centers and 13 community centers and one of the nation’s largest collections of Braille books.

The Institute, with an annual operating budget of $11 million, employs 300 staff members and has 2,300 volunteers. About 26,000 persons used the institute’s services last year.

In an age of talking computers and books recorded on cassette tape, is there any need for the blind to learn Braille?

Invented in 1824 by Frenchman Louis Braille, the system of raised dots that symbolize words and letters has become the universally accepted written language of the blind. But it is difficult to learn how to read Braille and only 10% of the nation’s blind can do so.

But supporters of Braille say it takes much less time to read a Braille book than it does to listen to one recorded on cassette tape. It is also an active medium as opposed to simply sitting back and listening to a computer-generated voice.

When electronic aids for the blind were introduced, “Some people were thinking, ‘Great, we don’t have to teach Braille anymore’,” said Anne Leahy, marketing manager at Telesensory Systems, a maker of electronic aids for the blind.

That has not turned out to be the case, Leahy says. “Braille is not dead at all.”