No, this is not a futuristic dream.  This is a soon-possible reality.  This July, at the National Federation of the Blind Convention in Dallas, a blind driver will take to the road. Michael Hingson’s goal is to be that driver. Michael’s very life this far has defied all odds.  Surviving the 9/11 WTC Terrorist attacks with his guide dog Roselle was perhaps the most dramatic. But blind people are breaking barriers and stereotypes each and every day.

The 2010 Race for Independence – Blind Driver Challenge is an event guaranteed to change the very definition of being blind.  Advancements in technology combined with the spirit of innovation and the power of keeping an open mind are being brought together to turn our attitude about “abilities” and “disabilities” on its head!

Join Michael in making history by supporting him in forging a new “first” with your donation.  Select the “Support” button and help him reach his goal, while demonstrating that together we can make a difference and change history.

All of the money raised from this event will be returned to National Federation of the Blind state and local affiliates in the form of grants and direct funds to help in educating the public about blindness, provide scholarships for blind students, and to aid in the development of new technologies to help blind persons in all walks of life including an automobile which can be driven by a blind person.

It will also be used to support the NFB Jernigan Institute’s programs for children, youth, college students, adults, and seniors.

Together with the National Federation of the Blind, you and Michael will change what it means to be blind. Let’s rev up those engines!

Michael is a proud member of the National Federation of the Blind which raises funds to educate the general public about blindness.  This organization is of vital importance to Michael and countless others, as it has played a vital role in redefining what it means to be blind.

Michael’s fund raising team for this challenge is “NAGDU,” or the National Association of Guide Dog Users, of which Michael is Vice President.  Michael is an ardent advocate and teacher on the importance and value of the human-animal bond, and what it can show us about teamwork.  After all, it was his Guide Dog Roselle that led Michael and others down from the 78^th floor of Tower 1 of the WTC to safety on 9/11.

The NAGDU’s team goal is $30,000, which they must reach before the NFB Convention on July 1^st of this year.  Click on the support button now to be directed to the donation page.  Michael and his current Guide Dog Africa thank you in advance and will keep you informed of their progress.

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National public speaker, teamwork and assistive technology expert, Michael Hingson is Vice President, National Association of Guide Dog Users (NAGDU) and President of the Michael Hingson Group, Inc. www.michaelhingson.com

Help Michael make history and by assisting him in his goal of raising $30,000!  Speed on over to the Race for Independence and donate today!

The need for keeping an open mind is evident in every area of our lives, whether related to medical breakthroughs, national healthcare, economic recovery and our personal qualify of life.  For example, as our nation is reportedly emerging from the economic recession which touched us all, has our response resulted in any substantive change? Even as the government is proposing widespread reforms, we have yet to hear leadership within the banking system taking any responsibility for the problems.  Nor are we seeing evidence that the banking industry is willing to open up small business lending.  Without a change in mindset within the banking industry, new regulations will likely fail to initiate policies which could foster the creation of new small businesses, creating jobs and generating profits that return to the community.

Self-assessment should be a part of our everyday lives, not just corporately, but individually.  “Did I do the best job here?”  “How could I have handled that conversation better?”  “How can I better teach my kids so they will grow up to be the kind of adults that any parent can admire?”  Truly looking at one’s actions is hard to do.  There is a reason why we are our own worst critic. Nevertheless, taking a minute or two several times a day to examine what we are doing and how we are doing it with an eye toward finding ways to improve will lead us towards becoming better workers, better family members, better friends, and better people.  The process starts with an open mind and a willingness to learn.

The enemy of growth and progress is a rigid belief structure that allows no room to learn from others or even ourselves.  As a suggestion, start each morning by asking “what can I do differently to improve myself today?”  Before going to bed at night ask what did I do differently to improve myself today?”  The very act of asking these questions will set you on a course towards progress.  As you genuinely look for answers, you may be pleasantly surprised.

This past March, I learned of the death of Dr. Arnall Patz at the age of 89.  Most people have never heard of Doctor Patz or his work.  I never knew him by name until three years ago.

In the late 1940s, Doctor Patz began to observe that babies born prematurely who were subjected to pure oxygen for two or more weeks exhibited a much higher incidence of blindness than babies who were not subjected to continuous pure oxygen for the same duration.  Upon definitive analysis and observation of 75 prematurely born children, Dr. Patz was able to establish a direct correlation between pure oxygen environments for some of these babies and blindness.

He applied to the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation for grants to study this phenomenon.  As he told me when I met him in 2007, his grant application was rejected by both organizations, saying that there could not possibly be any correlation between pure oxygen and blindness since, after all, we all breathe oxygen and that it was breathing oxygen that keeps us alive.  He was told that his observations could not possibly be scientific in nature.

By the mid-1950s, retrolental fibroplasia, (known today as retinopathy of prematurity) was recognized by many ophthalmologists as the leading cause of blindness in the United States.  In fact, it was so widespread among premature births that it lowered the average age of blindness in the United States in 1955 from 67 to 65 years of age.    Notwithstanding the original lack of support from the NIH and the NSF, Doctor Patz’ findings were validated and his position was vindicated.

I was one of those premature babies who became blind because of retrolental fibroplasia.  I was fortunate that my parents decided that they would not be using the “pity approach” to blindness to raise their child.

Today, retinopathy of prematurity still causes blindness, but only when a prematurely born child must receive continuous pure oxygen to survive.  It is now a “given” that if a newborn in an incubator can live without being subjected to ongoing pure oxygen for weeks, then irregular air supply should be utilized as much as possible in order to prevent the blindness we now know can be caused by pure oxygen.

You may be asking what relevance does this story have us personally and the for the world in which we live today.  The answer is quite simple if you take a look at the dynamics: On the one hand we had a lone doctor who observed something radically different than what traditional science believed to be fact.  On the other hand we had the predominant leaders of the scientific world who rejected scientific facts because they were unwilling or unable to keep enough of an open mind to objectively study Doctor Patz’s data.  As history revealed, Dr. Patz was correct and the so-called scientific community was wrong.  The delay on the part of science certainly caused more children to go blind than were necessary.

How often do we decide that something told to thus or even some observation we make ourselves cannot possibly be true because it goes against our established pattern of experience and belief?  How often do we fail to keep an open mind and thus miss a chance to learn something new?  A closed mind is a form of blindness.  If we close our minds to new ideas and concepts other than those we have come to accept we may never experience the growth and benefits that those new ideas and concepts potentially bring.

By “keeping an open mind” we can avoid unnecessary blindness figuratively, and as Dr. Patz’s life demonstrated, literally.

On April 16, 2010 Michael Hingson will speak at a formal dinner and fund raiser on behalf of the Concord-Merrimack SPCA in Concord New Hampshire.  “It was teamwork which permitted me and my guide dog Roselle to work together to escape from the terrorist attacks on 9-11, 2001,” states Michael Hingson, president of The Michael Hingson Group.  “My guide dog and I each have a job to do which together permits us to travel safely.”

“Most people take having a pet for granted when, in fact, animals have at least as much to teach us as we have to teach them.  Roselle’s and my story is living proof of the interdependent relationship which can be enjoyed by every pet owner.  I hope to inspire the Concord-Merrimack SPCA donors to increase support for the local shelter and to work to become closer to their own pets.”

Michael and Roselle’s teamwork saved not only their own lives, but the lives of the others whom they led to safety the morning of September 11, 2001.  Michael Hingson was working in his office on the 78^th floor of Tower One of the World Trade Center when the building was struck by the first plane.  At the time, Hingson was the Regional Sales Manager for Quantum Corporation, a Fortune 500 computer firm.  His guide dog Roselle received recognition as a true hero.

Michael Hingson was selected to address SPCA supporters to bring awareness of the importance of the human-animal bond, and to enhance appreciation of the unsung “heroes” that enrich our lives every day.  While Michael is in Concord New Hampshire, he will be available for media interviews.

Hingson is an internationally recognized public speaker and authority on teamwork and team building.  His company, The Michael Hingson Group, INC., provides diversity training to corporations, as well as national distribution for the KNFB Reader Mobile, the only fully portable device which permit blind persons to read any printed material anywhere.  More information about Michael Hingson is available at www.michaelhingson.com.  Michael can be reached at info@michaelhingson.com or by phone at (415) 827-4084.

Talks User Manual

This release uses the same version of Eloquence as the previous one (6.1.123). The TTS installation files for Eloquence have only been updated to mark them as supporting 5th Edition, and the user dictionary for US English has been extended.

RealSpeak Mobile is no longer included in this release, as there are some compatibility issues with the built-in TTS software on several recent phone models. Instead, the release now also includes a choice of male Vocalizer voices for English (US and UK), German and French.

Please note that the ZOOMS functionality is not yet available on 5th Edition phones.

For more information, please go to our TALKS & ZOOM Screen reader page.

This innovative program will take place Thursday, March 4, beginning at 9PM Eastern time, 8PM Central, 7PM Mountain, 6PM Pacific and 4PM Hawaiian time. In order to attempt to make this program as available to all as possible we are offering two ways to participate.

If you wish to participate via phone Here are the dial-in instructions for the call. The call — in number is (218) 339-3600. The access code is 329906#. Simply call in no later than times given above to be a part of this call. The program is free. Only any relevant long distance charges will apply.

You can also log into our conference room as well.

Please bring your questions as well as your own reading techniques. Please be ready to share and learn from the many other KnfbReader Mobile users and experts who will be participating in the call. No question is too silly and no idea is unwelcome. If you do not own a KnfbReader Mobile here is a chance for you to hear first hand from users how they read, learn, and succeed using this marvelous invention.

I look forward to meeting you all Thursday evening. Thank you in advance for participating in this first KnfbReader Mobile users forum.

Best,

Mike Hingson

January 3, 2010

Listening to Braille
By RACHEL AVIV

AT 4 O’CLOCK each morning, Laura J. Sloate begins her daily reading. She calls a phone service that reads newspapers aloud in a synthetic voice, and she listens to The Wall Street Journal at 300 words a minute, which is nearly twice the average pace of speech. Later, an assistant reads The Financial Times to her while she uses her computer’s text-to-speech system to play The Economist aloud. She devotes one ear to the paper and the other to the magazine. The managing director of a Wall Street investment management firm, Sloate has been blind since age 6, and although she reads constantly, poring over the news and the economic reports for several hours every morning, she does not use Braille. “Knowledge goes from my ears to my brain, not from my finger to my brain,” she says. As a child she learned how the letters of the alphabet sounded, not how they appeared or felt on the page. She doesn’t think of a comma in terms of its written form but rather as “a stop on the way before continuing.” This, she says, is the future of reading for the blind. “Literacy evolves,” she told me. “When Braille was invented, in the 19th century, we had nothing else. We didn’t even have radio. At that time, blindness was a disability. Now it’s just a minor, minor impairment.”

A few decades ago, commentators predicted that the electronic age would create a postliterate generation as new forms of media eclipsed the written word. Marshall McLuhan claimed that Western culture would return to the “tribal and oral pattern.” But the decline of written language has become a reality for only the blind. Although Sloate does regret not spending more time learning to spell in her youth – she writes by dictation – she says she thinks that using Braille would have only isolated her from her sighted peers. “It’s an arcane means of communication, which for the most part should be abolished,” she told me. “It’s just not needed today.”

Braille books are expensive and cumbersome, requiring reams of thick, oversize paper. The National Braille Press, an 83-year-old publishing house in Boston, printed the Harry Potter series on its Heidelberg cylinder; the final product was 56 volumes, each nearly a foot tall. Because a single textbook can cost more than $1,000 and there’s a shortage of Braille teachers in public schools, visually impaired students often read using MP3 players, audiobooks and computer-screen-reading software.

A report released last year by the National Federation of the Blind, an advocacy group with 50,000 members, said that less than 10 percent of the

1.3 million legally blind Americans read Braille. Whereas roughly half of all blind children learned Braille in the 1950s, today that number is as low as 1 in 10, according to the report. The figures are controversial because there is debate about when a child with residual vision has “too much sight” for Braille and because the causes of blindness have changed over the decades – in recent years more blind children have multiple disabilities, because of premature births. It is clear, though, that Braille literacy has been waning for some time, even among the most intellectually capable, and the report has inspired a fervent movement to change the way blind people read. “What we’re finding are students who are very smart, very verbally able – and illiterate,” Jim Marks, a board member for the past five years of the Association on Higher Education and Disability, told me. “We stopped teaching our nation’s blind children how to read and write. We put a tape player, then a computer, on their desks. Now their writing is phonetic and butchered. They never got to learn the beauty and shape and structure of language.”

For much of the past century, blind children attended residential institutions where they learned to read by touching the words. Today, visually impaired children can be well versed in literature without knowing how to read; computer-screen-reading software will even break down each word and read the individual letters aloud. Literacy has become much harder to define, even for educators.

“If all you have in the world is what you hear people say, then your mind is limited,” Darrell Shandrow, who runs a blog called Blind Access Journal, told me. “You need written symbols to organize your mind. If you can’t feel or see the word, what does it mean? The substance is gone.” Like many Braille readers, Shandrow says that new computers, which form a single line of Braille cells at a time, will revive the code of bumps, but these devices are still extremely costly and not yet widely used. Shandrow views the decline in Braille literacy as a sign of regression, not progress: “This is like going back to the 1400s, before Gutenberg’s printing press came on the scene,” he said. “Only the scholars and monks knew how to read and write.

And then there were the illiterate masses, the peasants.”

UNTIL THE 19TH CENTURY, blind people were confined to an oral culture. Some tried to read letters carved in wood or wax, formed by wire or outlined in felt with pins. Dissatisfied with such makeshift methods, Louis Braille, a student at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, began studying a cipher language of bumps, called night writing, developed by a French Army officer so soldiers could send messages in the dark. Braille modified the code so that it could be read more efficiently – each letter or punctuation symbol is represented by a pattern of one to six dots on a matrix of three rows and two columns – and added abbreviations for commonly used words like “knowledge,” “people” and “Lord.” Endowed with a reliable method of written communication for the first time in history, blind people had a significant rise in social status, and Louis Braille was embraced as a kind of liberator and spiritual savior. With his “godlike courage,” Helen Keller wrote, Braille built a “firm stairway for millions of sense-crippled human beings to climb from hopeless darkness to the Mind Eternal.”

At the time, blindness was viewed not just as the absence of sight but also as a condition that created a separate kind of species, more innocent and malleable, not fully formed. Some scholars said that blind people spoke a different sort of language, disconnected from visual experience. In his 1933 book, “The Blind in School and Society,” the psychologist Thomas Cutsforth, who lost his sight at age 11, warned that students who were too rapidly assimilated into the sighted world would become lost in “verbal unreality.”

At some residential schools, teachers avoided words that referenced color or light because, they said, students might stretch the meanings beyond sense.

These theories have since been discredited, and studies have shown that blind children as young as 4 understand the difference in meaning between words like “look,” “touch” and “see.” And yet Cutsforth was not entirely misguided in his argument that sensory deprivation restructures the mind. In the 1990s, a series of brain-imaging studies revealed that the visual cortices of the blind are not rendered useless, as previously assumed. When test subjects swept their fingers over a line of Braille, they showed intense activation in the parts of the brain that typically process visual input.

These imaging studies have been cited by some educators as proof that Braille is essential for blind children’s cognitive development, as the visual cortex takes more than 20 percent of the brain. Given the brain’s plasticity, it is difficult to make the argument that one kind of reading – whether the information is absorbed by ear, finger or retina – is inherently better than another, at least with regard to cognitive function. The architecture of the brain is not fixed, and without images to process, the visual cortex can reorganize for new functions. A 2003 study in Nature Neuroscience found that blind subjects consistently surpassed sighted ones on tests of verbal memory, and their superior performance was caused, the authors suggested, by the extra processing that took place in the visual regions of their brains.

Learning to read is so entwined in the normal course of child development that it is easy to assume that our brains are naturally wired for print literacy. But humans have been reading for fewer than 6,000 years (and literacy has been widespread for no more than a century and a half). The activity of reading itself alters the anatomy of the brain. In a report released in 2009 in the journal Nature, the neuroscientist Manuel Carreiras studies illiterate former guerrillas in Colombia who, after years of combat, had abandoned their weapons, left the jungle and rejoined civilization.

Carreiras compares 20 adults who had recently completed a literacy program with 22 people who had not yet begun it. In M.R.I. scans of their brains, the newly literate subjects showed more gray matter in their angular gyri, an area crucial for language processing, and more white matter in part of the corpus callosum, which links the two hemispheres. Deficiencies in these regions were previously observed in dyslexics, and the study suggests that those brain patterns weren’t the cause of their illiteracy, as had been hypothesized, but a result.

There is no doubt that literacy changes brain circuitry, but how this reorganization affects our capacity for language is still a matter of debate. In moving from written to spoken language, the greatest consequences for blind people may not be cognitive but cultural – a loss much harder to avoid. In one of the few studies of blind people’s prose, Doug Brent, a professor of communication at the University of Calgary, and his wife, Diana Brent, a teacher of visually impaired students, analyzed stories by students who didn’t use Braille but rather composed on a regular keyboard and edited by listening to their words played aloud. One 16-year-old wrote a fictional story about a character named Mark who had “sleep bombs”:

He looked in the house windo that was his da windo his dad was walking around with a mask on he took it off he opend the windo and fell on his bed sleeping mark took two bombs and tosed them in the windo the popt his dad lept up but before he could grab the mask it explodedhe fell down asleep.

In describing this story and others like it, the Brents invoked the literary scholar Walter Ong, who argued that members of literate societies think differently than members of oral societies. The act of writing, Ong said – the ability to revisit your ideas and, in the process, refine them – transformed the shape of thought. The Brents characterized the writing of many audio-only readers as disorganized, “as if all of their ideas are crammed into a container, shaken and thrown randomly onto a sheet of paper like dice onto a table.” The beginnings and endings of sentences seem arbitrary, one thought emerging in the midst of another with a kind of breathless energy. The authors concluded, “It just doesn’t seem to reflect the qualities of organized sequence and complex thought that we value in a literate society.”

OUR DEFINITION of a literate society inevitably shifts as our tools for reading and writing evolve, but the brief history of literacy for blind people makes the prospect of change particularly fraught. Since the 1820s, when Louis Braille invented his writing system – so that blind people would no longer be “despised or patronized by condescending sighted people,” as he put it – there has always been, among blind people, a political and even moral dimension to learning to read. Braille is viewed by many as a mark of independence, a sign that blind people have moved away from an oral culture seen as primitive and isolating. In recent years, however, this narrative has been complicated. Schoolchildren in developed countries, like the U.S.

and Britain, are now thought to have lower Braille literacy than those in developing ones, like Indonesia and Botswana, where there are few alternatives to Braille. Tim Connell, the managing director of an assistive-technology company in Australia, told me that he has heard this described as “one of the advantages of being poor.”

Braille readers do not deny that new reading technology has been transformative, but Braille looms so large in the mythology of blindness that it has assumed a kind of talismanic status. Those who have residual vision and still try to read print – very slowly or by holding the page an inch or two from their faces – are generally frowned upon by the National Federation of the Blind, which fashions itself as the leader of a civil rights movement for the blind. Its president, Marc Maurer, a voracious reader, compares Louis Braille to Abraham Lincoln. At the annual convention for the federation, held at a Detroit Marriott last July, I heard the mantra “listening is not literacy” repeated everywhere, from panels on the Braille crisis to conversations among middle-school girls. Horror stories circulating around the convention featured children who don’t know what a paragraph is or why we capitalize letters or that “happily ever after” is made up of three separate words.

Declaring your own illiteracy seemed to be a rite of passage. A vice president of the federation, Fredric Schroeder, served as commissioner of the Rehabilitation Services Administration under President Clinton and relies primarily on audio technologies. He was openly repentant about his lack of reading skills. “I am now over 50 years old, and it wasn’t until two months ago that I realized that ‘dissent,’ to disagree, is different than ‘descent,’ to lower something,” he told me. “I’m functionally illiterate.

People say, ‘Oh, no, you’re not.’ Yes, I am. I’m sorry about it, but I’m not embarrassed to admit it.”

While people like Laura Sloate or the governor of New York, David A.

Paterson, who also reads by listening, may be able to achieve without the help of Braille, their success requires accommodations that many cannot afford. Like Sloate, Paterson dictates his memos, and his staff members select pertinent newspaper articles for him and read them aloud on his voice mail every morning. (He calls himself “overassimilated” and told me that as a child he was “mainstreamed so much that I psychologically got the message that I’m not really supposed to be blind.”) Among people with fewer resources, Braille-readers tend to form the blind elite, in part because it is more plausible for a blind person to find work doing intellectual rather than manual labor.

A 1996 study showed that of a sample of visually impaired adults, those who learned Braille as children were more than twice as likely to be employed as those who had not. At the convention this statistic was frequently cited with pride, so much so that those who didn’t know Braille were sometimes made to feel like outsiders. “There is definitely a sense of peer pressure from the older guard,” James Brown, a 35-year-old who reads using text-to-speech software, told me. “If we could live in our own little Braille world, then that’d be perfect,” he added. “But we live in a visual world.”

When deaf people began getting cochlear implants in the late 1980s, many in the deaf community felt betrayed. The new technology pushed people to think of the disability in a new way – as an identity and a culture. Technology has changed the nature of many disabilities, lifting the burdens but also complicating people’s sense of what is physically natural, because bodies can so often be tweaked until “fixed.” Arielle Silverman, a graduate student at the convention who has been blind since birth, told me that if she had the choice to have vision, she was not sure she would take it. Recently she purchased a pocket-size reading machine that takes photographs of text and then reads the words aloud, and she said she thought of vision like that, as “just another piece of technology.”

The modern history of blind people is in many ways a history of reading, with the scope of the disability – the extent to which you are viewed as ignorant or civilized, helpless or independent – determined largely by your ability to access the printed word. For 150 years, Braille books were designed to function as much as possible like print books. But now the computer has essentially done away with the limits of form, because information, once it has been digitized, can be conveyed through sound or touch. For sighted people, the transition from print to digital text has been relatively subtle, but for many blind people the shift to computerized speech is an unwelcome and uncharted experiment. In grappling with what has been lost, several federation members recited to me various takes on the classic expression Scripta manent, verba volant: What is written remains, what is spoken vanishes into air.

CONTACT:

Chris Danielsen
Director of Public Relations
National Federation of the Blind
(410) 659-9314, extension 2330(410) 262-1281 (Cell)

cdanielsen@nfb.org

National Federation of the Blind
Announces 2010 Race for Independence

Fundraising Effort to Focus on Access to Technology for Blind Americans

Baltimore, Maryland (January 19, 2010): The National Federation of the Blind (NFB), the oldest and largest organization of blind people in the United States, today announced the 2010 Race for Independence, a fundraising effort focused on improving access to technology by blind Americans and supporting other NFB initiatives.  The Race for Independence is designed to raise funds for the National Federation of the Blind Imagination Fund, which supports the education, technology, and research projects of the NFB Jernigan Institute, as well as programs conducted by the fifty-two affiliates and over seven hundred local chapters of the Federation.  The Race for Independence will also bring public attention to the need for full and equal access for blind Americans to modern technology, in everything from home appliances to automobiles.  The initiative begins with a six-month campaign to raise funds from NFB members and friends that will close on July 31, 2010.

Dr. Marc Maurer, President of the National Federation of the Blind, said: “The Imagination Fund represents the hopes and aspirations of blind Americans.  Through this effort we are able to create innovative research, training, education, and technology programs that improve the lives of the blind and move us closer to our ultimate goal of full integration into society on a basis of equality.  The crisis in Braille literacy for blind children and advances in technology that, if not properly designed, will threaten the independence of the blind mean that time is of the essence.  But I am confident that with the help of our members and friends, we will ensure that blind children are literate and can pursue the career of their choice; that blind people have access to cutting-edge technology; and that opportunities for all blind Americans are limited only by our capacity to dream.”

Parnell Diggs, Chairman of the NFB Imagination Fund, said: “The Race for Independence is quite simply the expression of our desire to speed toward our goal of achieving first-class citizenship status in society at an ever-increasing pace.  It is the anchor of the National Federation of the Blind’s Imagination Fund, the annual campaign to raise proceeds for NFB programs at the national, state, and local levels.”

To sign up to be an Imaginator and help build the Imagination Fund, please visit www.raceforindependence.org or call (410) 659-9314, extension 2371.

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About the National Federation of the Blind

With more than 50,000 members, the National Federation of the Blind is the largest and most influential membership organization of blind people in the United States.   The NFB improves blind people’s lives through advocacy, education, research, technology, and programs encouraging independence and self-confidence.  It is the leading force in the blindness field today and the voice of the nation’s blind.  In January 2004 the NFB opened the National Federation of the Blind Jernigan Institute, the first research and training center in the United States for the blind led by the blind.

Are you tired of spending hours shopping and waiting in long lines to make those special holiday purchases? Thankfully, there is a quick and easy way to cut out the stress of the season.

The Louis Braille Bicentennial Silver Dollar is a unique and beautiful gift that benefits the National Federation of the Blind’s “Braille Readers are Leaders” campaign, a national initiative created to double the number of blind children learning Braille by 2015, improve certification standards for teachers of Braille, and conduct innovative programs to support Braille literacy.

Simply visit the U.S. Mint’s Web site or call 1-800-USA-MINT (872-6468) by December 11, 2009, to give the gift of Braille literacy today.

The U.S. Mint guarantees delivery by December 25, 2009, on any in-stock item, to anywhere in the United States for orders placed by December 7, 2009, for standard delivery, and December 11, 2009, for express delivery. Orders over $300 will receive free expedited shipping.

The Louis Braille Bicentennial Silver Dollar is a wonderful gift to show friends and family you care. To learn more about the coin and the Braille Readers are Leaders campaign, visit www.braille.org

200 East Wells Street at Jernigan Place
Baltimore, Maryland 21230
(410) 659-9314    Fax (410) 659-5129

The National Federation of the Blind meets the rigorous Standards for Charity Accountability set forth by the BBB Wise Giving Alliance and is Top-Rated by the American Institute of Philanthropy.