Without braille, millions of Americans can’t independently read a lab result, sign a lease, or vote in private. Screen readers and audio formats haven’t solved it.
More than seven million Americans ages 16 and older are blind or have low vision. Braille helps them access crucial communications. It works for the estimated 45,000 to 50,000 people who are deafblind and can’t use audio at all. It requires no other tech: it works without a device, a battery, or another person in the room.
For regulated organizations sending sensitive correspondence, braille is a key part of supporting blind and deafblind customers, patients or members. It’s the only way for these people to read a confidential document without someone else potentially hearing the content.
And it’s the law: If you handle Annual Enrollment Period (AEP) communications under Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) requirements, you know every accessible format has to be ready on the same compressed timeline as standard print. Government agencies, financial services firms, insurance carriers, and legal teams face similar compliance pressure across their member and constituent communications.
Given those stakes, you need braille materials quickly and at high quality. You also need data security. How your vendor produces braille content directly affects all this, and not all models are equal. Here’s what to look for.
Not All Vendors Produce Braille Themselves
Some accessibility vendors and language service providers handle braille production in their own facilities. Others subcontract it to third-party shops. For straightforward jobs on relaxed timelines, subcontracting can work fine. But it introduces risk.
Every time a file gets passed along to another vendor, it creates a new link in the chain: a new production environment with its own data handling protocols and a schedule that can’t be seen or controlled. Your organization may choose its braille vendor carefully, but what about that vendor’s partners? You don’t get a chance to vet them.
It’s a fair question to ask any accessibility vendor: do you produce braille yourselves, or do you subcontract it?
The Advantages of a Vendor with In-house Braille Production
Working with a vendor who produces braille themselves gives you more control, stronger data security, faster turnaround, better quality oversight, and better pricing. Here’s how.
Security: Fewer Hands on Sensitive Data
Braille files carry the same sensitive content as your standard print correspondence: benefit determinations, lab results, account statements, voting materials, legal notices. Protected health information (PHI), personally identifiable information (PII), financial records. Every file requires careful handling at every step.
When your vendor subcontracts braille, those files leave their environment and travel through one or more outside production facilities. You may have no visibility into who they pass your files to. Each outside facility has its own access controls, its own staff, and its own data handling protocols. Your compliance team may not even know a third party was involved.
BIG Language Solutions does the opposite: we produce braille inside the same secure environment where we receive your source files. The team that handles transcription also prints companion material and prepares everything for mail, so your data stays secure. We have full control and you have full visibility because it’s all done in one location.
Speed: Fewer Handoffs, Shorter Timelines
If you’re working against deadlines, CMS deadlines, statutory notice windows, or court correspondence schedules, you already know there’s no slack in the schedule. Braille can’t be an afterthought that arrives weeks after standard print.
Subcontracted braille production can take days longer due to handoffs. Your vendor transmits the file to an outside facility, where it enters someone else’s production queue. The finished output ships back for quality review, then gets re-transmitted for fulfillment. Each step takes time, and none of those steps are on a schedule you can control.
When your braille team and your other accessible format teams work under the same roof, those handoffs disappear. At BIG, one team owns the production process from intake to mailbox. When timelines are tight, that’s often the difference between making your mail date and missing it.
Quality: Certified Expertise Under Direct Oversight
Braille production is more technically demanding than most buyers expect, and the expertise required to do it well is uncommon. Here are five factors related to quality that are better controlled when using in-house braillists.
- Complicated formats: Braille translation software handles character mapping, converting print letters into their braille equivalents. But it can’t make the judgment calls that determine whether a finished document actually works for a tactile reader. A trained transcriber decides how to format headings, lists, and tables so they make structural sense to someone reading with their fingers. That same transcriber applies the correct braille code, the rule set that governs how print characters, contractions, and formatting translate into dot patterns.
And where the software misses problems, the transcriber catches them: ambiguous formatting inherited from poorly structured source files, incorrect handling of symbols and special characters, and layout decisions that look fine in print but don’t translate to a tactile medium. - Problematic source files. Source files don’t always arrive with clean structural markup, especially PDFs. Organizations that send poorly structured files add significant rework to every job, and when braille is subcontracted, there’s less opportunity to catch those problems early. When the braille team is in-house, those problems get flagged before transcription starts.
- Text expansion. Braille takes up far more physical space than print. A single plain text page with no tables or graphics will typically fill three to five braille pages. That expansion makes quality oversight both harder and more important. Every additional page is another place where an error can reach your recipient.
- Proofreading as a crucial step. Proofreading braille requires strict quality control and multiple layers of review. Someone without braille training can’t catch errors by looking at embossed output. Dot patterns that differ by a single raised dot can carry completely different meanings. Without trained, certified proofreaders on the job, subtle errors go undetected.
- Highly qualified resources. Certified braille transcribers (also called braillists) are in short supply nationally. The certification process is lengthy and demanding. BIG’s in-house braille team is nationally certified, and that certification shows in the work: 10,000 files processed with a 99.97% accuracy rate. If your vendor keeps certified transcribers and proofreaders on staff, ask what certifications they hold.
These five factors, taken together, are easier to manage and verify when braille production happens on-site at your vendor’s facility. When it’s subcontracted, they have less control and you have no way to confirm any of them.
Price: No Margin Layer
When braille is subcontracted, every vendor in the chain adds their own markup. With direct production, that markup disappears. Depending on your file types, volumes, and template complexity, BIG can often price below providers who pass braille work to outside shops, without compromising on certified expertise.
Beyond Braille: A Full-Service Accessible Communications Partner
The deepest advantages come when braille is part of a larger accessible communications operation, and that’s exactly what we have at BIG. Here’s what that means for our clients.
Braille in Languages Beyond English
Each language uses its own braille code with its own rules, contractions, and formatting conventions. Because we’re a language services company, we’re well-placed to handle non-English braille requests, as well.
Handling Production Through Fulfillment
BIG also produces audio formats and large print, and runs print, mail, and fulfillment operations on-site. You don’t need to coordinate between a braille vendor, a print vendor, a mail house, and a fulfillment partner. You work with one team from file intake to delivery.
This is especially useful for recurring programs and custom workflows. When one team controls the full process, client-specific templates, automated file prep, standardized review steps, and custom mailing workflows are straightforward to set up and maintain. When you update a notice template or benefit summary format, that change carries across braille, large print, and standard print in one pass.
BIG’s LanguageExpress™ platform supports this further by handling braille, large print, audio, and translations across 300+ languages through a single technology-enabled workflow. For organizations managing multilingual accessible communications on tight timelines, that means your braille, your translations, and your alternate formats can move through one highly efficient system instead of three separate vendor relationships.
A Stronger Foundation for Accessible Communications
The strongest accessible communications programs run on a single foundation: one internal team handling braille, audio, large print, print, mail, and fulfillment. Your recipients get a consistent experience. Your compliance team oversees fewer vendors. Your procurement team works with one accountable partner for the most sensitive correspondence your organization sends.
Ready to simplify your accessible communications workflow? Talk to BIG’s alternate formats team about braille, audio, large print, and fulfillment under one roof.
