Vital Volunteers

We face an enormous challenge – to double our capacity to transcribe Christian literature into formats that blind and partially sighted people can read. At present we add a little over one book a week to the audio and braille library collections, somewhat less to the giant print collection. But some among our around 1500 regular library users read a book a week, so for them there’s not much choice! We must strive to do more. Each year, around 4,000 Christian books are published in the UK alone.

Furthermore we would like to get to a position where we could routinely offer to transcribe the printed Christian resources that visually impaired people need and when they need it, and to offer the same service to churches so they can provide for the visually impaired members of their congregations.

Over the last couple of years we have invested in production equipment that allows us to produce audio, braille and giant print on demand in quantities from one to thousands. Now its the labour-intensive transcription process that limits what we can produce.

Currently we have around 80 volunteers working at home doing work related to the transcription of books. They record, check and correct reading mistakes books for the audio library, or format, proofread, and correct for braille and giant print books. The work these volunteers do is invaluable. Their sacrifice of time gives blind and partially sighted people the chance to read the books that sighted readers take for granted. And we know from their calls and letters that it is a blessing to them too.

To do more we need more: more computer literate volunteers, and more and better equipment to set them up to produce high quality books. Its also a great help to have a growing band of volunteers coming regularly into Torch House to work on transcription tasks. Could you have some time to give to this vital work? Contact Torch House or email Dosomething@torchtrust.org to ask for more information.

And if you don’t feel this is for you then pray for those who do this work. Also pray that this year will bring improved software for braille transcription and software that will allow us to prepare audio books for both DAISY and audio cassette media from a single recording. Progress here will boost our transcription throughput too.