About Brailletshirts.com
Brailletshirts.com started as a way to promote customized brailled t-shirts and other items on the web. I made my first shirt for myself, just for fun, with the phrase “If you can read this, you are too close.” It was done in some really small Swarovski crystals, size 6ss, which are equivalent to the actual size of a braille dot on a page. I also used grade 1 (uncontracted) braille, which made the phrase a bit unwieldy, but I didn’t know any better at the time. A friend saw it, and asked me to make some for other friends for Christmas. I put a couple on ebay, and they sold quickly. The idea took root, and here I am today, doing customs for people all around the world. I’d love to do one just for you, too.
About me
I’m Alice Woodside Lynch, currently residing in Jonesboro, Arkansas, USA. I’ve done the artsy-craftsy stuff as far back as I can remember. I am a Navy veteran, and graduated from Virginia Tech with a degree in interior design.
So, now you ask–how did I get into doing braille t-shirts? It’s a slightly convoluted story, but here goes. I like to read comic books. My favorite comic book character is a superhero named Daredevil. It so happens that Daredevil’s alterego, Matt Murdock is a blind attorney. In one issue of Daredevil several years ago, there was something written on a card that was passed to Murdock during a clandestine dinner meeting. I wanted to know if the artist had done his homework and this really said something, or was he just doodling dots on the page?
I used my Google-fu to find the American Foundation for the Blind website, and looked up the braille alphabet on their Braille Bug page. Interestingly enough, it did spell something, although on another page, a character showed up with a different first name than the braille note had said. Inside joke? Editorial goof? Who knows. But it inspired me to write the “Braille Bug” on the AFB link, and request an alphabet card. When it arrived, I wrote “Ms. Bug” an email thanking her (after all, it was a LADYbug), and got a nice reply from Francis Mary D’Andrea, who asked me if I might be interested in becoming a braille transcriber, since I had enough attention to detail to wonder about the comic art in the first place.
I thought about it, and sort of shelved the idea for a bit. A year or so later, I was having a routine eye exam and the ophthalmologist told me: “Bad news: you have macular degeneration. Good news: you probably will never go completely blind. You eventually may have to give up driving, and reading could become a problem.”
Driving, I can work around that. Reading? That’s a huge part of my life. I am well aware that there are audio books out there. I get them from the library for long trips. However, there’s nothing like reading to yourself. With that diagnosis, I decided that I’d start right away to learn braille, and if possible, I wanted to also learn to do textbook transcription. There should be no reason that blind students can’t have the same texts as their sighted peers. Literacy is way too important, and as a transcriber, I might be able to make a difference in a few lives.
I’m currently about halfway through my classes for braille textbook transcribing, and I love it. The side benefit of this is now I can do my t-shirts in the more economical grade 2 (contracted) braille. Let me make one that says exactly what you’d like it to say!
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