Museum of the American Printing House for the Blind

2001: APH completes the first phase of the transition from analog to digital recording in the studio. Digital recordings of Talking Books offer increased quality and greater navigating capabilities at a lower cost.

2001: The Hall of Fame for Leaders and Legends of the Blindness Field is announced along with the names of the first 32 inductees. The Hall is supported by the entire vision profession, but is housed at APH. Nine of the ten "living legends" from the Hall of Fame are honored at APH's Annual Meeting in 2002.

2003: APH's Accessible Textbook Initiative and Collaboration (ATIC) begins pilot production of a new large print process. These books are standard size full-color textbooks with a variety of fonts and font sizes (minimum 18 point).

2003: APH releases Book Port, a portable book reading device able to download and read electronic text files with synthetic speech or digital recorded books (including DAISY books) with human speech.

2006: Building on Patterns: Kindergarten Level is introduced by APH. This product is the successor to the highly successful primary braille literacy curriculum Patterns Reading Program.

2007: APH introduces the Braille+™ Mobile Manager, a small, talking PDA with a brailler-style keyboard. The Braille+ includes a myriad of functions, such as a word processor, calendar, wireless internet access, audio recorder, and an MP3 player.

2008: APH celebrates its 150th anniversary. In that year the Printing House embosses almost fifteen million pages of braille, more than fourteen million pages of large type, two million audio cassettes, and a wide variety of educational aids.

2010: The last Talking Book produced on cassette for the Library of Congress at APH rolls off the line as production is converted to the new digital cartridge. For the time being, magazines continue to be issued on cassette.

Explore Related Categories