Custom Brailling is here!

We are pleased and excited to announce the addition of

Jolene Boshart  to our staff with her expert ability to perform custom brailing.

We have learned that just because someone has a brailling machine it does not equate to a brailled document that is readable for a person who is blind.

For that reason, we have formed a relationship with "Jo" to offer her professional services to our clientele. 

Jo is known as the teacher of braille.  Jo has written the text book for teaching people to read braille. 

So why not have the most qualified person to braille for you?  Please call us or e-mail us with your custom brailling needs. 

Here is more information about Jo and her experience. In Jolene's words:

Few things have impacted my life as universally as Braille has. I use it every day to read and write; I label things for my hobbies (DVD's, spices, etc); I use it to study materials for my part-time job.

I have used Braille during my entire life. I learned it when I attended what was then the Nebraska School for the Visually Handicapped, where I spent my elementary and high school years. I can distinctly remember walking into the library and having to search it for something I hadn't read yet.

I then attended the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, where I utilized Braille in every class for note-taking--using the "old-fashioned" slate and stylus. I started out taking notes with a tape recorder, until a tape of notes self-destructed on the night before a final.

After college, I taught Braille and other skills for a year in Omaha, and then was hired as a teacher in Stuart Nebraska, where I taught English, speech and drama. I devised many ways to use Braille during my teaching, including lesson plans, labels to identify notebooks and journals kept by students, and labels for my files.

I then moved on to Lincoln, where I taught Braille for over 20 years at the Nebraska Commission for the Blind and Visually Impaired. It was while I was teaching there that I noticed a woeful lack of updated Braille series. Many of them were written in incorrect Braille, while others were tedious and boring. In 1995, I developed my own series called BRAILLE BASICS, and later a series teaching only Grade 1 Braille called BEGINNINGS. This series has been used by several states, including Nebraska, South Dakota, Oregon, California, Maryland and Texas. Recently, the book went international, when it was taken to Turkey by BlindCorp to help teach Turkish students. It is also on the way to South Australia. I keep revising it to keep things current, and am in the process of a major revision now.
I have also taught Braille to many school districts, and through Southeast Community College.

I now hold two part-time jobs. First, of course, is my own brailling business, J. B. Translations, which has been in operation since 1995. I am also a telephone interviewer for the University of Nebraska Medical Center, College of Public Health.
One of the things I am proudest of in my brailling business is that I have several repeat customers who have been with me throughout my business tenure. These include the National Federation of the Blind of Nebraska, Frank H. Woods Telephone Pioneers Association *which provides Braille and large print menus to Lincoln restaurants), Carlos O'Kelly's restaurant (where I do the national braille menus) and, of course, the facilities that use my books.

In case you think that all I do is braille, I am also very active in my church and in Toastmasters, International, where I am a past district governor (2002-2003). I also have many hobbies, including music, movies, reading, cooking, and cats.

Here is a partial list of the types of documents I can braille. This list is always subject to change, and includes the following:

Catalogs
Letter
Single-fold greeting cards
Business cards
Restaurant menus
Textbooks
Short stories
Instructional manuals
Address lists
Handbooks
Words to music (no music notation, please)
Pamphlets
Brochures
Interviews
Recipes
Cookbooks
Plays
Poetry
Surveys
Contracts

Please call us to visit about your custom brailling needs!