Less than a month before the start of the Soccer World Cup in Qatar – which will take place from November 20 to December 18 – the Benjamin Constant Institute (IBC), linked to the Ministry of Education, has produced and is distributing a free player sticker album, adapted in braille, to assist people with visual impairments.
The director of the IBC Education Division, Luigi Amorim, in an interview with the Brazil Agencysaid that the decision to make an album in Braille dates back to the 2018 World Cup, when a student brought this issue to his attention.
Amorim was finishing a math class for a 4th grade class and started talking about the content he would teach in the next class in which he would address geometric figures. He asked the students to run their hands over the surface of the table to know that it was a rectangle.
I learned that one of the students liked soccer, supported the Brazilian team and that, using a slate (an instrument created for writing Braille) with an artifact called a punch, he was able to make rectangles to paste the team’s figurines. The slate is one of the first instruments created by Louis Braille for writing Braille, so that the blind can read and write, punching the paper.
At IBC, Amorim was part of a teaching material adaptation sector and had expertise to make figures for Braille writing. That week, he had just completed the Cup album with his son and decided to make one with rectangles for sticking the stickers and give it to the student in the next class. Amorim also distributed to other IBC students and managed to send some copies abroad, but the work was not publicized as of now.
Launch
On September 23, the week in which the IBC celebrated its 168th anniversary, the new Copa album – adapted in Braille – was presented to the visually impaired community.
Luigi Amorim guides students and other visually impaired people interested in collecting the World Cup figurines and pasting them in the album to download an application that reads images called Lookout.
“The application reads the sticker number and there they [pessoas com deficiência visual] they have all the information that the sticker brings such as height, weight, player’s name and year in which he debuted in the national team”, he explained.
The album has an extra page for each selection. The arrangement of the stickers is the same as in the common album. The big difference is that each team has an extra page in which the legend with all the players appears.
The director commented that the only thing missing for the album to provide complete independence and autonomy to people with visual impairments is that the figurine has a cut at the top to identify whether it is upside down or upside down.
Drawing
An initial print run of 200 albums was made, distributed internally at the IBC. Another 3 thousand are being sent to subscribers of Dots Magazinea quarterly publication in braille, aimed at children and young people, and the Benjamin Constant Magazine (RBC), both from the IBC, from more than 20 Portuguese-speaking countries.
“Any institution that assists people with visual impairments can request that we send them. We are also making the file available, if the institution has a braille printer, so that it can print there and the person has access to the album”, informed the director.
The IBC has in its school, with regular enrollments, 260 students from preschool to professional education. The institute, however, serves a larger number of students – 960 – including early education, care, athletes, people who lose their sight and seek rehabilitation, postgraduate and master’s degrees.
Unity
Student João Lucas Meireles Uchôa, a 5th year student at the IBC school, with low vision, considered the creation of the album in Braille to be a great idea. “There are people who don’t see and will be able to complete the album. This will bring the school closer together. everyone will be able to change [figurinhas] and no one will be left out”, he celebrates. The figurine he likes the most, and which he still doesn’t have, is Neymar’s golden one. “Very difficult,” he said.
With the repeated figures, João Lucas said that he and his colleagues play a type of hit-and-run game. The game is like this: you place the figurines upside down, hit them on top and those that turn belong to the player who hit. With that, collectors get new stickers to paste on albums, explained the IBC student.
*Collaborated by Gabriel Brum, reporter for Rádio Nacional.
