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Due to COVID-19, our Museum and Factory Tours have been temporarily suspended.  Due to delivery delays with the USPS, please allow 6 – 8 weeks for delivery on items shipped via Free Matter for the Blind and 3 – 4 weeks for items sent via Priority Mail. If you have any questions, please contact cs@aph.org or call 1-800-223-1839.

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Have What You Need for the Next School Year?

Braille Trail Reader LE

Before you throw on your flip flops and head to the beach, be sure to get the most out of your quota dollars, and rest easy during summer break knowing your items will arrive before the start of the next school year. Visit shop.aph.org for all of your educational products and textbooks needs. Below are a few of our most popular products:

Product Updates

  • Clothing Management – 5-08232-01
    Food Management – 5-08232-02
    Home Management – 5-08232-03
    Self Management – 5-08232-04

    The Functional Skills Assessment (FSA) is a tool for evaluating daily living skills for students in primary grades, middle school, secondary school, and those preparing for, or enrolled in, post-secondary transition programs. Each braille manual is available for FREE download at www.aph.org/manuals/. The web-based, Online Scorebooks for each FSA Module can be found at funcsk.aphtech.org. Codes for each module are located on the inside cover of the manual associated with that Module (i.e. Food Management Scorebook).

  • Spring is in the air, and that means it is time for a new APH Products Catalog! If you wish to continue receiving, please respond to the email or postcard that you’ll soon receive, or email catalogs@aph.org by June 28, 2019. If we do not receive a response, your name will be removed from our mailing list.

  • Students who use tactile communication symbols can now request their favorite personal music player—The Joy Player. Requested by Cindy Corbett, a visual impairment and orientation and mobility specialist from Indiana, APH now offers STL files of the Joy Player button switches on the Tactile Graphic Image Library. Whether your student uses the 3-D printed symbol alone or mounted on a communication card, he or she can express a personal desire to listen to music in an appropriate way and expect a response. Tactile symbols are tools for teaching important communication and functional literacy skills.

  • Get your little patriot ready to celebrate Flag Day and the Fourth of July. Join Max as he learns his flag routine. Ms. Mary uses visual modeling and tactual modeling to teach Max to reach, observe, and imitate.

    Watch Video

  • Looking to find more fun in learning tactile literacy? Revisit Setting the Stage for Tactile Understanding (Catalog # 1-08853-00) and play “Find the Tactile Differences” using the 3D House Model and House View Cards included in the kit. Is the window in a different position? Is the chimney on a different side? What about the roof texture? The variety of House View cards in Setting the Stage will challenge your students’ tactile literacy skills.

    Shop Setting the Stage for Tactile Understanding

Announcing APH’S Expanded Brailler Repair Program

Have a Perkins Brailler that needs to be repaired? APH is pleased to announce that we have expanded our Brailler Repair program.

What does this mean for you?

  • Quicker return times on repairs.
  • Repairs by our in-house APH team, or outsourced to technicians who are certified by Perkins in Major Repairs.

Submitting your repair request is easy:

  1. Send your brailler to APH, to the attention of the Repairs Department. Be sure to include a note with your contact information and address, and any information you may have regarding what needs to be repaired and/or the issues you are experiencing.
  2. There is a flat rate of $150 for out-of-warranty brailler repairs, and APH requires pre-payment of this fee. Please note that we cannot begin a repair without a signed Federal Quota form, or payment information.

    Payment options include:

    • Federal Quota Funds: If you will be using Federal Quota funds to pay for your repair, you will need to also include a Federal Quota Form, which must be signed by the EOT. You can find a copy of this form on our website.
    • School Purchase Order
    • A check
    • Credit Card – if you opt to pay by credit card, note this when you send us your brailler and we will contact you for the credit card number/information.
  3. Once your brailler has been repaired, it will be shipped back to the address you provide.

Summertime is a great time to get your braillers repaired and working! If you have any questions, please contact our Customer Service team.

NOTE: Repair charges are for Perkins Braillers only.

Events

  • Load up a world of savings on selected APH products with APH’s Spring Fever Sale 2019, April 1—June 30. As always, first come, first served.

  • Here is your chance to review a groundbreaking technology for braille readers! APH is conducting a field test for the Canute 360. The Canute 360 is a stand-alone desktop multi-line braille e-reader. The Canute has a display of nine lines of forty characters supporting all six-dot braille codes including music, math, and foreign languages.

    APH will have a very limited number of units for review. We are seeking braille readers who are ages 6 years to 99 years. If you are available to test this product for a limited time with several students or adults, we want to hear from you! Testing will begin in late June and will require a few hours of commitment, along with the completion of a short survey by you and one by each participant who tests the product.

    Join in for a great adventure in reading!

    For additional information, please contact Carolyn Zierer at czierer@aph.org.

    Apply to Fieldtest Canute

  • M-Enabling Summit
    June 17-19 – Washington DC

    Braille Challenge
    June 21-22 – Los Angeles, CA

    ISTE Ed Tech Conference
    June 23-26 – Philadelphia, PA

STEM Corner

Information about the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA)

NSTA resources include books for the professional science teacher, five journals addressing different academic levels of science teaching, and national and regional conferences. That is not all: Dedicated to promoting science literacy for all students and supporting the Individuals with Disabilities and No Child Left Behind Acts, the NSTA provides information to help teachers eliminate obstacles faced by students with disabilities. The Science for Students with Disabilities web page, opens a new window contains links that address general, cognitive, and physical disabilities. Navigation to the Visual Impairments web page, opens a new window starts off with general methods of making the science classroom accessible and continues with teacher presentation, the laboratory, and field experiences, among other specific topics.

You can peruse the website for information and/or join the NSTA on their website.

Visit NSTA

Literacy Shared

Both APH and Les Doigts Qui Rêvent, the French tactile book publisher, share a strong commitment to providing high quality tactile books designed to be equally shared by all types of readers: young braille and print learners, sighted parents and peers, as well as parents with visual impairments. Since 2013, APH has selected and translated seven tactile book titles designed and produced by LDQR. These have been available to U.S. students as quota purchases.

Within our field we are well aware of the critical role tactile books play in fostering emergent literacy skills. Yet the larger literacy field—librarians, authors and illustrators of print children’s books, children’s literature specialists, and mainstream publishers—is largely unaware of these books and what makes them unique.

Recently our field had a rare chance to raise awareness among these groups across the globe. The most recent issue of Bookbird: An International Journal of Children’s Literature, published by the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY), features an article about tactile books written by LDQR founder, Philippe Claudet. It is informative in describing the ingredients of successful tactile book design and pointing out that a tactile “book famine” still exists for children who are blind and visually impaired.

Since we are more effective when we work together to inform and advocate, we invite you to learn more about IBBY and Bookbird.

Treasures from the APH Libraries

  • Irwin, Robert B. “How Your Club May Help the Blind to Read.” The Clubwomen, Feb. 1935.

    Written by Robert Irwin during his tenure as Executive Director of the American Foundation for the Blind, this article alerts the reader that a concerned person now has the opportunity to help people who are visually impaired through a new technology – the talking book. Talking books are so important as to be “…the nearest thing to the regaining of sight itself,” since the invention of braille 100 years earlier. New phonograph technology could offer a half-hour’s worth of reading from a single record, twelve-to-fifteen of which could hold an entire book. A recent act of congress made the production and postage of these discs free, and readers could sign up for the service at any of the 26 public libraries with “Departments for the Blind” in the US. At the time of publication, only the first group of talking books had been produced, with plans for a talking book library to be established through a the Federal appropriation for books for the blind. However, the one problem that Irwin was asking help for was with the purchase and distribution of the talking book reading machines. Since federal funding was only available for books, the only way for readers to actually receive the machines was through the philanthropy of people such as the women’s club members that this article reached out to. “How Your Club May Help the Blind to Read” has been digitized for Internet Archive.

    Visit Archive

  • Maxwell, J. C. (2010). Everyone communicates, few connect: What the most effective people do differently. Nashville, Tenn: Thomas Nelson.

    The overarching premise of Everyone Communicates, Few Connect by John C. Maxwell is that if one desires to succeed when speaking and creating lasting relations they must first learn how to connect with people. Maxwell goes on to express his believe that effective communication is a major determining factor in reaching an individual’s full potential and a cornerstone of effective leadership. The author concludes that when individuals are cognitively aware of how they communicate, that anyone can make every communication an opportunity for a powerful connections whether applied in private conversations or public speeches.

    In Everyone Communicates, Few Connect the reader is given Five Principles and Five Practices to develop the crucial skill of connecting, including: finding common ground, keeping your communication simple, capturing people’s interest, inspiring people, and staying authentic in all your relationships. Though many maybe common sense, Maxwell strives to expand one’s understanding of these principles and drill down to their core through practical and sometimes personal examples, folksy anecdotes, and quotations to show why connections are important. Each chapter ends with bullet point advice about how to employ each principle in three common situations: one-to-one, a group, and an audience. Everyone Communicates, Few Connect seeks to teach skills necessary to not only help leaders get the message across, but also connecting enthusiastically with what others see, hear, feel, and understand.

    The APH Barr Library supports research initiatives at APH, while the Migel Collection is one of the largest collections of nonmedical information related to visual impairment in the world. Although the collections do not circulate, an ongoing digitization effort means APH will make materials available online at https://archive.org/details/aphmigelOpens a new window. The digitized texts are available in a variety of accessible formats, including DAISY, Kindle, EPUB, PDF, and read-aloud. Contact Library staff: resource@aph.org, 800-223-1839, ext. 705