The future of braille is not at all clear.

That's according to the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped. In its latest newsletter, the NLS says that even though technology has made it easier than ever to produce a standard printed book, technological solutions have not come so easily in the braille world.

If technology is a challenge, the bigger challenge for producers of braille materials is reflective of one of the bigger challenges facing publishers of all printed materials -- a lack of copy editors and proofreaders.

Almost every publication I come across contains errors. Some have a lot of errors. I remain fairly astonished that I find so many things wrong in books published by the top houses. I found so many mistakes in articles in a recent edition of The New York Times Sunday magazine that I wrote an email to the editor complaining about them. Never heard back, of course. The guy or gal had to be mortified.

I cannot imagine how much harder it must be to edit something in braille, though.

This situation, regardless of whether in regular print or in braille, is not going to get better. As I have written here before, colleges are eliminating required editing and proofreading courses, and they were never popular to begin with.