It’s a story right out of Hollywood: a dashing young cowboy from Montana visits 1912 Los Angeles, loses his eyesight—as well as his will to live—in a gun accident, and attempts suicide. His mother, who has come to nurse him back to health, interrupts the attempt and entreats him to go to church, where he regains his will to live. Because this is better than anything Hollywood can dream up, the cowboy, J. Robert Atkinson, learns braille and so impresses a benefactor with his intelligence and drive that in 1919 they give him a $25,000 gift (equivalent to about $325,000 today). With that gift he converts a standard printing press in his garage to a braille press and establishes what will become Braille Institute®.
Braille Institute’s sprawling Sight Center on Vermont Avenue and its four regional centers provide educational programs and services free of charge to more than 76,000 blind and visually impaired people yearly. Clients have access to job counseling, life skills and enrichment programs, low vision consultations, a library with more than 1.1 million volumes in braille and recorded formats, and much more. Central to the Institute’s mission is supporting literacy in children, so they may grow and thrive in a literature-rich environment on a par with their sighted peers. The Institute’s Braille Literacy Initiative consists of the Braille Challenge®, an annual competition for grades one through 12, and the provision of free braille materials to readers as young as two years old. The Challenge is a national reading and writing contest that motivates students to practice their literacy skills. Now in its 10th year, the number of contestants has grown to more than 700 from 39 states. The publishing component of the initiative produces and distributes more than 2.5 million braille pages a year, on an on-demand basis. Norris Foundation funds supported the Braille Literacy Initiative in 2009.