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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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