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School is back in session in San Antonio. Teachers have carefully crafted assignments for students. There is one staff member at a San Antonio school district who is responsible for creating assignments for visually impaired students in braille. But what goes into creating different curriculums such as geometry, music, and history for students who are visually impaired?
Dennise Frausto has been an instructional assistant-braillist for San Antonio’s Northside Independent School District for five years. She is the only braillist in the district. She shifted her original career path as a speech pathologist once she met Pre-K student Ayub Abraham-Flores in a Head Start program in 2010.
“And he was completely blind, so I became kind of a one-to-one for him, and that's what kind of pushed me into going into the V.I. (visually impaired) route instead of the speech pathology route, because of that little boy, " said Frausto.
Frausto was not familiar at the time with braille, a way visually impaired individuals read information through raised dots. It’s a code composed of six dots that make up letters and numbers within a cell. Every letter, every indicator is within those six dots, or a combination of dots.
“So if you've ever seen Book of Eli, if you've ever seen that movie at the end where it's just a book that looks blank?” said Frausto. “That's what braille looks like. It's blank to the eye, but once you see it up close, it's a bunch of dots that are raised where the person who is visually impaired touches them and feels the formation is what tells them what it is.”
Frausto took on the challenge to find a way to help Flores with his learning.
“So I just took a brailler home one weekend, learned all about it as much as I could, and came back and started brailling for him and doing things accessible in braille, besides giving him objects and things like that that the classroom teacher would do,” said Frausto.
Abraham-Flores is now a 17-year-old junior at the Innovative, Technology, and Entrepreneurship program at Holmes High School. He’s also a mentor along with three other blind students.
“So Miss Denise has been my braillist since kindergarten, and I like how she brailles my stuff,” said Abraham-Flores.
Frausto and Abraham-Flores both grew with the technology used for the visually impaired. Frausto said the process of creating braille assignments for all of Northside ISD has become easier through the years because of technology.
“I do a lot of editing in Word and then transfer it into a translation program,” said Frausto.
The program is known as embossing with a couple of machines that print written and graphic braille assignments, respectively.
Abraham-Flores explains what he feels when he reads a braille assignment on geometric dilations.
“I have dots that can tell me,” said Abraham-Flores. “So here at the top, it says ‘9, 6, practice dilation, determine whether the dilation from figure K to K is an angle enlargement or a reduction and answer all questions in each problem.’ So, each cell has its own meaning. Here is the number sign and followed by the number 9 and then the hyphen symbol, and then another number sign and a number sign, and then the number 6.”
Abraham-Flores jokes that he’s Frausto’s editor for the braille activities she creates.
“I always observe to make sure there aren't any mistakes,” he said. “And if there are any mistakes, I email her,” said Flores.
Frausto still uses a slate and stylus — a little silver bar with a needle — to manually correct any braille assignments. This requires her to puncture the braille manually with the paper flipped backwards.
"So, when you punch and you turn the paper, it would be the right way,” said Frausto.
Following the rules of the Braille Authority of North America, Frausto also tailors the paper to the texture sensitivity of each student.
“Some students get double-spaced braille versus single-space,” said Frausto. “There's also something that's like contracted and uncontracted braille, which is like shorthand versus the one-to-one, letter-to-letter braille. …There's four different textures when you do images.”
Danielle Gonzalez, a teacher of students with visual impairment at Northside ISD, says she and the rest of the faculty depend on Frausto to help them create accessible learning experiences for visually impaired students.
“When they say, 'it takes a village,' this is our village,” said Gonzalez. “We couldn't do this without Dennise. Dennise couldn't do this without the students and the teachers providing her the feedback that they give her.”
Gonzalez emphasizes a further need for braillists in other districts.
“In rural areas where there's not a braillist, the TSVI (teacher of students with visual impairment), the VI (visual impairment) teacher is responsible for not only teaching the student, but they're also brailling,” said Gonzalez.
“So if it takes her four to five hours to do one assignment, where do you fit in the time to work and teach that student? Here in Northside, we have a large district, so some of us have upward towards 22 students on our caseload. … (W)e only have seven braille students in our district, but where would we find the time to service all of our kids if we were having to do both braille transcribing as well as teaching the students how to read the braille and how to access their curriculum? So our students could not be successful without Dennise.”
Jenice Dames, the Visual Impairment Coordinator for Northside ISD, echoes the same sentiments about Frausto.
“I tell her she's never allowed to quit and she's never allowed to go anywhere, and she's never allowed to accept another job, because we couldn't do this without her, and even if we hired another braillist, it wouldn't be Dennise,” said Dames.
Dames emphasized the amount of respect Frausto has earned across the district, from teachers, students, and parents. She says Frausto is irreplaceable.
“So yes, we could get another braillist, but I want it to be Dennise, just because I know how committed she is, and how important this work is to her, and having a connection to a student, all of that just drives her passion for it. And I don't think we could find all of that wrapped into another braillist. And I'm not knocking anyone else who's a braillist, but there's only one Dennise.”
Ayub Abraham-Flores graduates next year and hopes to start a podcast.
“I want to make it about accessibility on Apple products. I like exploring technology a lot,” he said.
He also wants to build an app for visually impaired individuals.
“So it's going to be like a virtual person that's all the time on your devices, and can guide you and read text, just like those apps, like ‘seeing’ AI,” said Abraham-Flores.
As for Frausto, her skills don’t stop at San Antonio’s Northside ISD. She is getting a braille certification through the Library of Congress and will extend her expertise to transcribing San Antonio local artist’s written work into braille to send to the Library of Congress.
