Pioneer Printers
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HOME This literature production unit of the Pioneer School for the Visually Impaired provides learning, reading and teaching support material in braille, audio….

The School for the Blind was established in 1881 to attend to the needs of blind learners. In 1948 the first separate class for the partially sighted was formed and only later, in 1964, large print literature was initiated. Later during that year audio production on open reel tapes started. In 1980 the braille, the large print and the audio recording departments moved into a new building. Pioneer Printers operated as the literature production unit of the Pioneer School, which is a government school, within the Western Cape Education Department (WCED). In 2011 Pioneer Printers became a non-profit organisation generating its own funds and working in close relation with Pioneer School and Kaleidoscope SA (Institute for the Blind) Braille is the primary medium by which the blind person can learn to read and write and become fully literate. At the age of ten Louis received a scholarship to attend the Royal Institution for Blind Youth in Paris. By the time he was 15 he had worked out a system and published the first ever braille book in Braille was taught at his school only after his death at the age of 43 in The first Afrikaans Braille system was designed and introduced at the School for the Blind in Our viewpoint is that all school learners that cannot read ordinary text should be taught braille. The tasks of Braille SA included the maintenance of good quality braille systems. At this stage Pioneer Printers is the only production unit in South Africa specializing in transcribing mathematics, science and music braille codes. It takes about two years to train a music braille transcriber. Braille proofreading: Braille proofreading consist out of a team of two people, a blind person reading the braille and a sighted person following the original text, checking and making sure that the braille book coincides with the textbook and that the quality of the braille is of a high standard. AUDIO SOUND Digital audio sound recordings are done in our high quality soundproof studios. Audio sound recordings are a secondary medium to braille for the blind person that can read braille, but it acts as a very important assistive medium for the blind and partially sighted who cannot read braille. We produce creational and educational books, magazines, newspapers in audio sound format and duplicate them onto MP3 CD’s for visually impaired people. The first experiments with audio recordings on vinyl records were made in A label with the necessary information of the audio book is printed on the CD and then it is packed into a CD box with an address card on it, ready for distribution. The narrators undergo a voice test where they read a prepared and unprepared part from a book and or magazine. Only when approved the volunteer narrators are trained and become a regular reader reading several hour periods during the week. Later years an ordinary photocopy machine was used to make enlargements up to A3 size, but the quality of these enlargements never really complied to the specific needs of the partially sighted learners. Where Pioneer Printers mainly focuses on the production of literature for the visually impaired in Braille, large print and audio format, it is now also able to offer the following services at affordable prices, thereby also supporting the provision of literature to visually impaired persons in SA.