Swim boy's dream machine in action

A TEN-YEAR-OLD boy who raised £1,900 towards a special braille machine at Brixham College to help disabled adult students has seen his dream come true.

Jacques Andrew is delighted the specialised Tiger braille embosser to translate typed text into braille for visually impaired students has finally gone into use by the adults of Access to Community Education.

It's even on offer to local restaurateurs who might like to see their menus transcribed for visually impaired diners.

College spokesman Jenny Harriman said: "The original fundraising effort was started by Jacques with a sponsored swim in the sea on Christmas Day last year. He raised £1,900 towards the project. The final £800 was raised through raffles and table top sales."

The Tiger embosser will allow ACE administrator Yvonne Ramos to transcribe work from tutors using the software which converts ordinary text to braille.

Jenny added: "She will have to strip out any fancy text such as bold and italics as blind people just need to be able to read the words. Many prefer no capitals."

She will then send the text to the printer which prints on to special, thick paper allowing the braille dots to be raised, making them easy to feel for the reader.

"The machine will also print spreadsheets, graphs and pictures by raising a series of dots to cover the areas required. It uses different depths of dots to delineate colours."

The machine was eagerly awaited by Jenny Bradley, Ian White and Charlotte Parkinson, who are all members of ACE.

They are looking forward to having the same information sheets in their cookery, gardening, pottery and creative writing classes as other students.

The braille embosser is also available to people attending mainstream adult education courses.

Jacques has been invited to the ACE Christmas lunch by chairman Chris Wardley. She said: "We want to thank him in person. What he has achieved is quite remarkable."