In honor of the 200th birthday of Louis Braille, The Braille Authority of North America (BANA) created the Braille Excellence Award. This award is given biannually to people or organizations that have developed or contributed to a braille code, have developed code materials, or software that supports codes, and/or who represent the highest standards of braille production. BANA renamed this prestigious award the Darleen Bogart Braille Excellence Award in 2019 in honor of the retirement of BANA's longest-standing member.
The first award was presented to Dr. Abraham Nemeth for his contributions making math and science accessible for blind people around the world. Abraham Nemeth was born completely blind in 1918, in New York City, where he spent most of his life. Although mathematics instantly became a passion for Nemeth, he was encouraged by his counselors to pursue a degree in psychology at Brooklyn College. Following his bachelor’s degree, he continued his education at Columbia University, where he earned his master’s in psychology, while attending evening classes in physics and mathematics. As the math courses became increasingly more difficult, Nemeth proceeded to develop his own system of braille mathematics, adopted in the U.S. in 1952, named the Nemeth Braille Code for Mathematics and Science Notation. Shortly after the development of his code, he joined the Department of Mathematics at the University of Detroit, where he created a system of communicating mathematical formulas, called MathSpeak. During this time Nemeth received a Ph.D. in mathematics from Wayne State University. Abraham Nemeth’s contributions and advocacy have had a world-wide impact on generations of mathematicians and scientists. Dr. Nemeth accepted his award at a special brunch at the annual conference for the California Transcribers and Educators for the Blind and Visually Impaired (CTEBVI) on Sunday, March 15, 2009.
The second recipient of the Braille Excellence Award was Mr. Joseph Sullivan who was honored in 2011. Joe Sullivan, president of Duxbury Systems, Inc., was the chief architect of the original Duxbury Braille Translator software. He is a mathematician by schooling (Boston College H.S. 1958, Boston College A.B. Mathematics 1962, Northeastern University M.S. Mathematics 1968), and has designed software for most of his working life. He worked at the U.S. Navy's David Taylor Model Basin, at Bunker-Ramo Corporation, and at MITRE Corporation before helping to found Duxbury Systems. Joe served as the representative from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) on the BANA Board in the early days of our braille authority. He served as a member of the BANA Literary Braille Technical Committee and was a member of the original committee that designed the Computer Braille Code -- the BANA committee chaired by Dr. Tim Cranmer in 1987. Joe also served as an active member of the Unified English Braille Code (UEBC) committee of the International Council on English Braille (ICEB). He served as chair of "Committee II" (the basic code design committee) of the Unified Braille Code Research Project of the ICEB and currently services on ICEB's Code Maintenance Committee. His efforts for the past four decades have helped bring braille codes more directly into alignment with print while retaining readability, and to enable more efficient braille production in English and other languages.
The 2013 Braille Excellence Award celebrated the accomplishments of the CBA-BANA Joint Committee on Tactile Graphics. This group of committed individuals from Canada and the United States worked on the development of guidelines for the production of tactile graphic materials for all braille users. The guidelines were comprehensive in scope covering many subject areas and included additions and updates for BANA codes for mathematical diagrams and publications. The CBA-BANA Joint Committee on Tactile Graphics, which was co-sponsored by the Canadian Braille Authority (CBA) and BANA, worked diligently for a decade to incorporate suggestions, revisions and technological innovations into a set of guidelines based on research to make graphic materials produced by agencies more accessible to braille readers. The standards for the design and production of tactile graphics as set out in the Tactile Graphics Guidelines represent the highest standards for braille production. The members of the CBA-BANA Joint Committee on Tactile Graphics were Lucia Hasty, Co-Chair; John McConnell, Co-Chair; Irene Miller, Co-Chair; Janet Milbury, Allison O’Day, Aquinas Pather, and Diane Spence. The breadth of the audience affected by the availability of tactile graphic materials is very large, and the impact and use of tactile graphics for braille readers is difficult to quantify. The CBA-BANA Joint Tactile Graphics Committee received the award on December 5 in Providence, Rhode Island, in a showcase session at the 2013 Getting in Touch with Literacy Conference.
The 2015 Braille Excellence Award was presented to Ms. Darleen Bogart in recognition of her service as an international braille advocate, braille transcriber, braille teacher, and Canada's National Braille Convenor. Ms. Bogart was the longest-standing member of the BANA Board, first as an observer at the very first meeting in 1976, and then as a representative from the Canadian National Institute for the Blind, now known as CNIB. Ms. Bogart's international contributions are vast, especially in the development of Unified English Braille (UEB). She was a member of the planning committee for the first two international meetings on English braille, 1982 and 1988, and served as host in Canada for the founding meeting of ICEB 1991. She was a founding member and President of the Canadian Braille Authority, now known as Braille Literacy Canada, and had also served as President of the International Council on English Braille (ICEB) during its development of the Unified English Braille system. This well-deserved honor was presented November 20, 2015, at the Awards Banquet hosted by the Getting in Touch with Literacy Conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico. In 2019, the BANA award was renamed the Darleen Bogart BANA Braille Excellence Award in her honor and upon her retirement from the BANA Board.
In 2017, BANA honored Dr. Larry Smith, a respected music braille transcriber and principal reviser of two music braille texts. Dr. Smith, a retired professor of music, had served as chair of two organizations' music braille committees. Dr. Smith became interested in music braille when he taught a blind music student at Kalamazoo College. He learned both literary braille and music braille, becoming an expert music braille transcriber. Soon he assumed leadership positions in braille-related organizations, serving first as Chair of the Music Braille Committee of the National Braille Association (NBA) and then as NBA's President. Although he retired from Kalamazoo College as a full professor of music in 1996, Dr. Smith became Chair of BANA's Music Braille Committee and was principal author of BANA's most recent Music Braille Code revision, published in 2015. He was also principal reviser of the second edition of Introduction to Braille Music Transcription, published in 2005 by the Library of Congress' National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled (NLS). He continued to work in the field he loves and served as a consultant in the preparation of the third edition of Introduction to Braille Music Transcription. This well-deserved tribute was presented at the first general session of the Getting in Touch with Literacy Conference in New Orleans, Louisiana, on December 7, 2017.
Dr. Robert Englebretson was the recipient of the 2019 Darleen Bogart BANA Braille Excellence award on November 19, 2021, at Getting in Touch with Literacy conference in Seattle, Washington. Dr. Englebretson, Chair of the Linguistics Department at Rice University in Houston, Texas, teaches courses on syntax and morphology from a cross-linguistic perspective, discourse analysis, research methodology, field methods, introductory linguistics, and advanced seminars on grammar in social interaction. Dr. Englebretson is a lifelong braille reader and since the late 1980s, he has taken an active interest in braille notations of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), which is central to the field of linguistics. From 2005 to 2010, he served as ICEB's U.S. Representative to the UEB Committee for Foreign Languages and Linguistics, under the auspices of which he developed IPA Braille, an up-to-date braille notation for the symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet. He is frequently consulted by blind students in introductory linguistics or phonetics courses as well as the faculty teaching these courses, asking questions related to braille and the IPA and ways of making class material more accessible. He has authored books and numerous articles and received funding from the Institute for Education Sciences (Department of Education) for a major research project designed to explore the knowledge, skills, and strategies teachers of students with visual impairments to more effectively teach braille.
The Darleen Bogart BANA Braille Excellence Award was presented in 2023 to Dr. Sarah Morley Wilkins in recognition for her work to promote music braille in North America and around the world, most notably through the DAISY Music Committee, and for her early research on tactile graphics. Dr. Morley Wilkins served as Director of the National Centre for Tactile Diagrams for RNIB, and her work added important research about techniques for creating and interpreting tactile graphics, with and without audio description. She most recently has served as Project Manager for the DAISY Music Braille Project. In this role, she led the international group in support of music braille software that supports the BANA Braille Music code as well as other international music braille formats, improved standard music file formats for accessibility, and supported the development of accessible and interactive software tools for blind musicians. This work reinforced the importance of braille music in the US, Canada, and other countries and led to the development of a Music Braille Production Network to assist in helping agencies in the US, Canada, and around the world to create, procure, and share music braille files. Dr. Morley Wilkins received the award at the Getting in Touch with Literacy Conference in December 2023, in St. Pete Beach, Florida.