Thank you very much.
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. It's a pleasure for me to be here with you this morning to talk about braille. It's extremely interesting to be here with you all, because we are celebrating the 200th birthday of Mr. Braille, the ingenious inventor of this tool. I am also going to talk to you about the impact of the new unified braille code, both in terms of rehabilitation and alternative media. This is what I will be speaking about today.
I'd like to start by saying a few words about myself and my role at the Institute. The Chair has suggested that I give you a little introduction. I have been working at the Institut Nazareth et Louis-Braille for the past seven years. I am responsible for two services: technical assistance and alternative media formats, meaning everything related to the production of braille, e-texts, tactile graphics, digital full text DAISY, large print and, of course audio.
Technical tools are made available to the visually handicapped—be they blind or seeing impaired—to ensure that they can resume their activities, be it writing, reading, or getting around. These tools range from computers to braille note takers, braille output devices and white canes—in short, everything that is related to the provision of technical assistance. That is my role at the Institute.
The Institut Nazareth et Louis-Braille is a rehabilitation centre that provides adaptation and rehabilitation services to the visually handicapped living in Quebec, specifically in Montreal, Laval and the Montérégie region. The Institute covers a very large territory that represents approximately 50% of francophone clients in Quebec.
Other rehabilitation centres provide services to the visually handicapped in Quebec City or in other regions such as Trois-Rivières and so forth. They also provide services, but the volume of those services is more concentrated in the urban areas. Understandably, mobility is often an issue. As a result, in order to have access to these services, these individuals often live in urban centres.
Essentially, we provide services in various fields. It can be in the area of helping people resume their daily activities such as getting dressed, feeding themselves, etc. When people lose their vision, they must relearn to do things such as brush their teeth. When people suffer a substantial vision loss, they need to relearn things or learn how to do things differently. We help people do that.
We also help people with mobility issues and with getting around by showing them how to use a white cane or a guide dog. We also provide psychological support services and lessons in braille to people of all ages.
In 2006-07, some 8,000 individuals were registered at the Institut Nazareth et Louis-Braille for direct user services. We're talking about 5,350 direct services, excluding optometric services. These are services that I have just described, whether it be helping people resume their daily activities or get around or teaching them braille and so forth.
Some of the clients of the Institut Nazareth et Louis-Braille are blind and use braille. In Quebec, approximately 1,500 are able to read braille fluently. We could add to that figure some 300 or 400 francophones, maybe more, living outside Quebec.
Before continuing, I would like to stress the fact that there are two types of braille: grade one braille and grade two braille. Grade II braille and Grade I braille. Grade I braille is a letter-by-letter, word-by-word transcription.
Grade II Braille is a series of approximately 900 abbreviations presented in documents. For example, the word “necessary” is transcribed by “nc”, and the word “certainly” becomes “cn”. It is similar to stenography, which you may be familiar with. Why are there two types of braille, Grade I and Grade II braille? It has to do with the ability to quickly read documents and the volume of paper needed for braille. On a 8 1/2 x 11, 12 points font page of paper, braille has a ratio of 2.5. When you are producing a document that is 2,000 pages long, it works out to 3,000 pages of braille. Grade II allows good readers to read information more quickly.
The Institute Nazareth et Louis-Braille is about 150 years old. The Institute has been operating for about 35 years, providing services in its current form. You may recall that before 1970, the blind were sent to separate schools. When integration became the norm, the visually handicapped were able to integrate regular schools, while continuing to receive support from the Department of Education and the Department Health, through rehabilitation centres such as ours.
The Institute has always been concerned with the issue of alternative media formats and the role that it plays in this area. The Institute is a founding member of the Canadian Braille Authority, which is a pan-Canadian body responsible for various issues related, among other things, to standardization. On the anglophone side, the standardization of English braille is an issue for this body. On the francophone side, this initiative began in 2001 and was completed in 2006-07. I will come back to that a little later. We also play a role with regard to the Canadian Braille Authority.
We are very involved in the Comité québécois de concertation sur le braille, the CQCB. This committee falls under the Office des personnes handicapées du Québec and brings together four networks: education, rehabilitation, culture and community living. The CQCB is a very active organization in terms of promoting and ensuring wider access to braille.
We also work in close collaboration with the group of international experts on all braille-related issues within the Francophonie. Recently, we undertook an initiative to reform Grade II braille, since this need was identified by Francophonie members. Quebec, France, Belgium, Switzerland and the African countries are now meeting to ensure that once we have dealt with reforming Grade I braille, we can move on to address Grade II braille.
We also provide assistance as a member of the advisory committee of the Canadian Transportation Agency, which will be meeting shortly. We play a consultative role with that agency with regard to adapting transportation and documents provided to individuals using public transit. There are also other issues related to accompanying the visually impaired.
We are very concerned about the issue of public transit, especially throughout Quebec. We are therefore cooperating with the Société de transport de Montréal et with AMT, the regional transit authority, in regards to transit issues.
The new unified French braille code was adopted in response to a need that had been identified. In the past, a number of codes were used throughout the Francophonie. Document layout was left to the discretion of the individual publishers, who simply followed established guidelines.
A blind person might read a document and, depending on whether he or she were in France, Quebec or Manitoba and depending on who produced that document, the layout would be different. So we wanted to standardize document layout rules. We also wanted to review the use of symbols. We needed to agree, for example, on how to standardize indicators for enter/return, upper-case, bold, or italic. This standardization process came about as a result of the problems we had faced. This was a collaborative effort that began in 2001 in the wake of the Casablanca agreement and that led to the creation of a task force that examined this whole issue.
The standardization process was completed in 2006. In fact, France adopted the code in 2006. An order was issued, and the code was enforced as of that date. In Quebec, the code is slated to come into effect in September 2009. We finally gave the go-ahead in November 2008. We agreed on a date, on ways to disseminate the new information, and on an implementation schedule. The code must be implemented in the educational, rehabilitation, and cultural communities, so in several areas.
Today, I'm going to talk to you more about rehabilitation, although I am comfortable answering questions dealing with other aspects. As you can well understand, the rehabilitation community is very small. One often comes across the same people.
