Have a go at learning Braille with the Colombian Institute for the Blind at FILBo.
The Colombian Institute for the Blind are running braille workshops at this year’s FILBo as Ángela Forero-Aponte discovers.
FILBo offers an opportunity to listen to and exchange ideas with writers, intellectuals, journalists, historians, and all sorts of experts. This year the Colombian Institute for the Blind (INCI) are there to teach people about braille. The Bogotá Post attended a very interesting workshop led by Enrique King, coordinator of the virtual library at INCI, as he showed participants more about Frenchman Louis Braille’s writing system.
Spectators took a crash course on braille to learn, and practice the code, and had the opportunity to understand the raised-dotted characters, do some exercises in interpreting the code, and write their names and some sentences, too.
Not only is the language itself fascinating, King was full of useful information – such as the fact that all human beings have six sensory receptors in their fingertips, and that blind people use their index fingertip to read as it is the most sensitive. There were other reading systems for the blind before Braille’s, but his has proven to be the most effective. This workshop will be repeated throughout the week if you want to learn the code for yourself.
