Welcome to a brand new month on the podcast. My name is Chris Gallipo, your host of Sidessel School, episode 2,739. A Braille Translator

dots the Way to Success. So glad you're out there. Thanks for tuning in. In this week's first $1,000 segment, we're going to meet a linguist who combines their love for language and passion for accessibility to start a side hustle, translating written content into Braille. I love this and as part of this feature we always

investigate how this person goes from idea to income, how do they make their first thousand dollars and often far beyond but the whole point is

that once you begin to earn real money the steps required to go to the next level are often easier.

So we want to get you our listeners to that first thousand dollars and then as I said beyond.

So let's see what we can learn today from this translator.

She is a linguist.

She'll give us a little bit of background.

Talk a little bit about Braille.

I didn't know a whole lot about it beforehand. So it's good to learn that as part of the research.

Then I'll have a few words of wrap up at the end. Hey, by the way, thank you for being there.

All right, here's a story. Hi everyone I'm Maggie and I'm a linguist by profession as well as a speech therapist.

My journey into Braille translation began when I volunteered to transcribe menus for a local restaurant that they better wanted to serve their visually impaired customers.

The experience opened my eyes to the need for more accessible written content and sparked the idea for my side hustle.

As I delve deeper into the world of Braille, I discovered that the process was much more complex than simply substituting letters with dots.

Braille is a tactile reading and writing system that uses combinations of raised dots

to represent letters, numbers, and punctuation marks.

Each braille character or cell consists of six dots arranged in a 3 by 2 matrix,

allowing for 64 possible combinations.

To ensure accuracy in my translations, I invested in a Braille embosser and specialized software

that could convert digital text into Braille embosser and specialized software that could convert digital text into Braille.

And I also took courses in Braille literacy to better understand the nuances of the system,

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