For Jana Hertz, it’s all about the rush she gets when she watches students excelling at braille, a code of raised dots that will serve them as a crucial guide into the sighted world, helping advance their education opportunities and future employment.

“It’s empowering to know that you can impact a kid’s life so they’ve got access to the world,” she said. “It’s the kids that have kept me going.”

For the 25th time on Saturday, June 28, Hertz will be a judge for the National Braille Challenge held at USC.

The only academic competition of its kind in the nation for students who are blind or visually impaired, the challenge will host 50 of the world’s best braille readers in five age categories and five contests, competing for first, second and third places. To get there, the students won preliminaries held in the United States, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom and Ireland.

By 2030, 7.2 million Americans are projected to have visual impairment. Only 8% of visually impaired students are primary braille readers, according to data from the Braille Institute of America. But a survey of students who have participated in the challenge found that 80% have pursued higher education, which institute officials said highlights the program’s role in fostering academic success.

The annual competition promotes the importance of braille literacy and motivates students to practice and hone their braille skills, Hertz said.

Younger readers — those in kindergarten through fourth grade — are challenged in three categories: spelling, proofreading and reading comprehension. Readers in grades five through 12  compete in those, plus a speed and accuracy contest and in reading charts and graphs.

The speed and accuracy contest is Hertz’s baby.  After two dozen years judging it, the Aliso Viejo resident is affectionately known as the “Simon Cowell of Braille.”

Speed and accuracy is the competition’s most challenging event, she said, and each person scoring the contest has to be braille certified.

The contest involves students listening to a narration and transcribing what they hear in 45 minutes. To win, there can be no spelling errors, no missed punctuation and no confusion in what they’re writing.

Those who win, Hertz said, have good spelling skills, auditory skills and “braille meticulously.”

Claire Stanley, now 37 and an attorney and lobbyist in Washington, D.C. for the American Council of the Blind, won the challenge in 2007 as a high school student at Mission Viejo High.

For her, learning braille has been invaluable, she said.  A brain tumor took her sight at 9, and she spent about two years in a Capistrano Valley Unified School District classroom learning the code.

The contest was meaningful, she said, because it was a special event just for low-vision and blind students.

“It was a fun and exciting way to bring us together,” she said Thursday, after flying in to attend the event. “There were so many things that my sighted peers could participate in, but this was just for us. It was great to meet others and build relationships and share stories.”

While more recent technological advances have provided digital textbooks, Stanley said dependence on the technology has also led to fewer braille teachers and a loss of connection with the texts.

“It’s just so important to learn braille because you’re just really engaging with the literature, and I just think that’s much more helpful to engage in what you’re reading and understand it,” she said.

Learning to braille and transcribe

Hertz, 71, was first exposed to braille in 1989 when she assisted Rachel Heuser, a teacher in the Capistrano Unified School District who worked with visually impaired South Orange County students.

“One day she asked me if I’d play Go Fish with a blind first grader, who was just learning braille,” Hertz said. “There were these cards with just raised dots. We were learning the first 10 letters, and I played with her, just matching up the letters. After playing for an hour, I knew five or six letters.”

She stuck with it, ultimately earning her certification as a braille transcriber.

Heuser, of Laguna Niguel, who retired from CUSD in 2019, said she was impressed by Hertz’s attention to detail and her conviction that blind students deserve the right to literacy, just like sighted students.

“There was a shortage of braille transcribers and I wanted to do everything to encourage her,” Heuser said. “Jana is a person that’s driven by her beliefs. Working with the blind resonated with her.”

Hertz recalls another blind student, 13 years old, who had come from Mexico and had never been exposed to braille or attended school before. Hertz was with her through high school, transcribing texts and what the teacher wrote on the whiteboard.

“I explained to her what she didn’t understand because she had her materials in braille and sometimes she didn’t understand what the braille was saying,” she said. “I was the bridge between print and braille.”

And, then there was Stanley, whom Hertz transcribed for from second grade through her senior year. Because Stanley took honors classes, many texts weren’t readily available in braille through the district, and Hertz transcribed everything she needed.

“I probably worked her too hard sometimes, but she was wonderful,” Stanley said of the many documents Hertz transcribed for her.

Stanley didn’t give Hertz a break after high school, either. Following her graduation from UC Davis, Stanley called Hertz again for help after enrolling as UC Irvine’s first blind law student.

“A true braille transcriber like Jana knows how to format things,” Stanley said, adding that proper formatting is really important in legal briefs. “It’s important to know where things begin and where they end. With braille technology, someone would plug in a braille embosser, hit emboss and whatever would pop out.”

To become really good at transcribing, Hertz said patience, precision, continuing education and an unyielding commitment to detail is required.

“One dot difference can mean the difference between ‘brother’ or ‘brothel,”‘ Hertz said. “One dot can make a huge difference. When you learn to become a transcriber, the only certifying agency in the United States is the Library of Congress.”

And that takes completing a 19-lesson coursework and transcribing the equivalent of about 20 written pages with fewer than seven errors.

In addition to working for the Capistrano Unified school district, Hertz taught braille transcribing and how to become certified at the Braille Institute in Anaheim until 2017,  and continues to teach online.

Game Day

Hertz gets excited as the challenge approaches, knowing she’s going to see the “best of the best” competing, she said. “They’re all winners.”

It will take Hertz and her team nearly eight hours to read and score the submissions. If questions arise — “Was it an error in braille? Was it a ghost dot?” — the judges confer, coming to a decision together.

Over the years, there have been some humorous mix-ups, Hertz remembered, like when all the finalists misunderstood “sexual rivalry” for sectional rivalry and “missypissy” for Mississippi.

Hertz has yet to see a contestant with a perfect score, but she has had some come very close.

The contests, she acknowledged, usually consist of more than can be completed in the allotted time. Students are given two or three passages to braille — that’s about 1,200 to 1,500 words in 45 minutes.

After the judging wraps, the festivities begin. The excited contestants file in dressed in their finest, she said. Before each winner is introduced, the audience learns a little about them.

“I’m very proud of all of them,” Hertz said. “It makes me proud that I play a small part in something so endearing and so meaningful.”

Transcribing braille, she said, is “profoundly human” because it gives those who are blind or sight-impaired a way to receive information independently and not rely on someone else’s voice or presence to access the world.

“That is the dignity of braille,” she said. “That is its power.”

“And that is why I care so deeply about transcribing well,” she added. “It’s not just about following the rules, though, of course, we must. It’s about honoring the person who will one day pick up that page and trust that what they feel is accurate, reliable, and made for them.”