The National Library Service offers many wonderful resources, including e-braille books, known as Web Braille. Here are the steps to follow to locate braille books in electronic format. Before you can download any Web Braille books, you need to call your local Braille Institute library to get an account. The staff in the library have been wonderful, so give them a call (go to www.brailleinstitute.org for more information about library services).
1. Go to the National Library Service website: www.loc.gov/nls
2. Click on Search the Catalog.
Hopefully you have a book title or author’s name in mind as you’re searching. Let’s use an example (thank you Mrs. Tomlinson and Jesus for the great idea--I love the Lemony Snicket books, too!). Author: snicket lemony
3. Tab to the field “Keyword” and type in web braille
4. Tab to the field “Material Type” and choose Braille (for those using a screenreader there is an arrow in this field, so use your arrow keys to hear the choices).
5. Tab to Search and press enter/return.
6. If there are web braille books available, your query results will list how many are available. For my example of Lemony Snicket, there were 13 results listed. The author and title of each book is displayed along with information about the publisher, book number and volume. Next, you should notice a link that starts with "http". This is the actual link to download the e-braille book. If you’d like a short description of the book before you download it, then click on “More on this record” and the next page will give more information, including “Notes,” that provides a summary of the book.
7. To download the e-braille book, click on the “http” link. At this point, the computer will prompt you for your username and password as authentication. You should already have this information that you got from calling your local Braille Institute library to set up an account. Type in your username and password, then press enter. NOTE: The next page is the Web Braille Agreement information. Please read this and understand that under Fair Use Laws, a braille reader is entitled to download this book for his or her own use. Discuss the meaning of the agreement with your students/teachers.
8. Click on the appropriate option: I Accept, Best for PC users will download the book to your computer.
A dialog box will appear, asking whether you want to save or open the file. Click on Save.
9. Here is a very important step. The computer keeps track of files by number, but if you want to know which book you’re downloading later, make sure you change the name to something you’ll remember. If it’s more than one volume, type the title or part of the title followed by the volume number. Example: I’m downloading The Grim Grotto, which is two volumes, so I type: Grim Grotto1 for my first volume. Next, I find my Web Braille folder that I created on my computer Desktop, and then click Save to save the volume in that folder. The file should download quickly. To get the next volume, press backspace to go back to the page with the links, then click on the next volume, save it as Grim Grotto2, and click Save.
10. You can now transfer the book to your book reader, or open it in a braille translation program such as Braille2000 or Duxbury, and emboss the book.
Good luck, and post a comment about your successes or problems. Happy Reading!
