The high cost of braille production

[SusanJ]

In just the past few days I've received three separate posts on the
current, continuing, high cost of producing braille (and related
accessible) materials in the US.

A K-12 public school teacher wrote me, "We just got a [braille]
science book for a 6th grader that was $6,000."

A university staff member wrote me, "At a recent meeting of AHEAD,
some one from a college that had their first blind student indicated
they just paid over $18,000 for a [braille] College Alegbra book."

A manager at the Virginia State Department of Education posted to the
NIMAS Interest Group, "The intensity of creating NIMAS formats from
scratch is not something we want to undertake, but there is little to
no NIMAS versions of requested texts in the NIMAC. It is taking my
staff members at AIMVA more than 30-70 man hours to create a NIMAS
version of a book from scratch."

My main reasons for posting this information are
(1) to provide data that individuals could use to show that direct
support of a project is likely to be cost-effective
(2) to underline the importance of developing solutions that can be
used in a variety of contexts