Last January, on World Braille Day, EBU presented a new video, The Importance of Braille. It is an audiovisual presentation of many life situations when Braille comes in "handy" and allows blind people to access to information efficiently. The video was recorded in September 2022 in Madrid with the Braille Working Group of the EBU and with the great help of ONCE. It would not be possible without a perfect film crew, of course, who were diving into Braille with kindness and professionalism. In our Braille working group, as in other EBU working groups, many nations are represented, of course, and our communication language is English. The first choice of the video language was English, obviously. And once we had the video ready for you, it reached out to EBU members in English and attained almost 800 views in five months, which is absolutely exciting.
We knew the work was not finished. Our purpose is to talk to people, to endorse the importance of Braille, and to show how easy it can be to introduce Braille into the daily life of a blind person. Since January 2023, we have worked hard to bring the message of this video to more and more people. To achieve this, seven other language mutations of the video were created thanks to the efforts of Braille workgroup members and the filming crew. You can now watch the video in Dutch, French, German, Portuguese, Slovak, Spanish, and Swedish. Of course, not only the voice of the narrator speaks to you in these languages; captions of the video and text files of scene-by-scene descriptions were also translated. As with English, we tried to find the best-suited narrators for the video and twisted our tongues in the translations to the target languages to fit all the wording and keep the full meaning of the English version. By the way, one of the video language mutations is being read from Braille; can you guess which?
We hope this adaptation will allow more people in Europe to watch the video in their own mother tongue and give them the confidence in Braille that we are trying to instil in this highly digital era.
None of these achievements and Braille promotion would not be possible without the generous support of the European Blind Union and the European Union itself. Thank you for supporting and listening to the Braille voice of blind and partially sighted people in Europe.
All language versions are available on the EBU website.