The Next Generation Perkins/APH Brailler Wins Acclaim

Product Development Technologies (PDT), Perkins Products and the American Printing House for the Blind (APH) have been honored in the 2009 International Design Excellence Awards (IDEA) sponsored by BusinessWeek, the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA), Target and Autodesk for the Next Generation Perkins/APH Brailler.

The IDEA competition is a celebration of the year's most innovative and exciting product and product concept designs and one of the world's most prestigious and recognizable design competitions.

The brailler received a Silver award; out of 1631 entries, only 47 received this honor.

The Next Generation Perkins/APH Brailler's excellence lies in its potential to be a life-changing product, one determining the difference between a life of literacy or illiteracy; a life with or without employment; a life full of productive independence or codependence.

In the United States, 70% of citizens who are blind are unemployed or underemployed.

However, 80% of those who use braille are employed.

In other words, literacy reverses the numbers.

This is a very real scenario for people who are blind in the US and around the world.

"One of the chief goals of re-designing the classic Perkins Brailler," says Perkins Products General Manager David Morgan, "was to make this indispensable communication tool easier to carry and more convenient to use."