A newspaper by young braillists, for young braillists
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Introduction
Welcome to the homepage of the Tactile Times website! You can find out about all the latest news for young braillists here, as well as subscribe, contribute and get in touch with us. We have published five issues so far aiming to keep young braillists throughout the UK and beyond updated with articles about fun things to do, technology, sport, events and much more.
During the first lockdown, we also sent out weekly events updates to give our subscribers one place they could go to for a list of the events happening each week. You can view an archive of these updates on our issues page.
We are Ellie, Lexy and Theo, three young braillists who thought it would be fun to set up a way for young braillists to share news, experiences, event information, jokes and more. We are run by young braillists and our content is aimed at young braillists. We realised there were no newspapers directly aimed at young braillists and this is why we set up the Tactile Times. To find out more About us check out our About us page.
If you are visiting this website for the first time, you might find the Where to start section of this page helpful.
Our online fully-accessible advent calendar and live countdown to Christmas is back for its 3rd year running. We've got 24 hidden surprises lined up, from some Christmas jokes to Christmas music sent in by our contributors. Bookmark the page and come back on the 1st of December to open the first door and count down the days to Christmas with us.
Subscribing and contributing
New Issue coming soon...
Anyone can subscribe to the newspaper via the subscription form on this website or by contacting us, and it is completely free to subscribe to both the electronic and hard copy braille versions.
We use Google forms for our subscription and feedback forms, and it is very accessible and easy to use. If one of our forms doesn't work, try clicking the link to complete it inGoogle forms (if available).
To contribute, you must be a young braillist (a young blind or visually impaired person (VIP) who has at least some experience of braille).
Copy deadlines will be posted on our Useful information page in the useful dates section.
You are welcome to visit our Contribute page at any time for tips and ideas on what to contribute.
Appearance
We have put together some buttons below to help you customize the look of this page.
Background colour
Font size
Text colour
Hyperlink colour
Heading colour
We recommend you do not set the background and the link colour to the same thing, as the links wil disappear from view. Whenever you change the background colour the link colour is automatically set, so we recommend you change background colour and then link colour
Navigation
This website has been designed to be fully accessible to anyone, including those using a screen reader. It has lots of headings to help you navigate and to group things into sections to make them easier to find. If you would like to find the full menu, just navigate to the menu heading. We have included in-page hyperlinks to help you skip around the page, as well as adding headings for different sections of the page. Our issues are also designed with easy navigation in mind, and they include hyperlinks, headings and a lot more. If you have any accessibility suggestions for this website, please get in touch with us, and we will try our best to make it happen!
Audio logo
We have an audio logo available to play from the button below. Have some fun playing with it!
Our WhatsApp group for readers
If you are a young braillist and would like to chat to other Tactile Times readers, why not join our WhatsApp group?
The group was created during lockdown and it is a great way to keep up-to-date with the latest news from us and chat to other readers in a safe environment.
To send us your join request, just enter your details here and you will be added to the group after approval.
Strava club
We now run a Strava club for anyone who is interested in joining. The club provides a way for us to send out updates via Strava, as well as provide a space for people to share activities.
The club will also provide a way to share any Strava challenges you find, so we can help each other find more challenges and earn more badges.
To join, just click below and signin/signup to Strava using an Apple ID, a Google account or an email address.
Join our Strava club here
You can find a summary of the club's progress this week below.
Publicity
As articles, social media posts, newsletters, podcasts and interviews that were focused on us and the effort we are putting in to keep braillists updated started to pop up online, we thought it was time for a publicity page on this website to group all these webpages together into one place. You can access it here and it may be helpful to new visitors to this website. If you are interested in being linked to from the publicity page, just write something about us and send us the link.
Games
We have now launched a new website where we plan to have lots of accessible games that can be played in any web browser You will need to make sure JavaScript is switched on in your browser settings to play the games. Currently, this website contains a Hangman game which we are beta testing, so if you want to test it for us, check it out and then send us your feedback.
We are trying out a chatbot and need your feedback. If can be found by clicking the chatbot link under the Games which are currently live heading on the homepage of our games website.
The website also contains a couple of Kahoot! challenges and a new leaderboard for our C-race game.
Visit our new Games website here
Our blog
Our blog contains all the latest updates from us, and copies of the emails we send out to subscribers.
The blog is hosted on WordPress.com, and it provides us with a quick way to post updates. You can subscribe to the blog to receive all our blog posts in your inbox. View our blog here You can also view our latest blog posts by clicking on the links below.
No I Tech Blog
our tech blog (called the No I tech blog) contains useful tips, technology guides, appreviews and more.
You can view it here.
Useful links
We have a useful links page that lists links to other websites under different categories. If you have any suggestions for additions to it, please contact us.
View our useful links page here
Where to start?
If you don't know very much about us yet, why not start on the about us page where you can find out about who we are ore browse our FAQS? If you already know about us, you might like to take a look at the useful links page which lists useful websites under different categories or check out if we are planning to publish an issue (and if so when the deadline for submitting articles is) on our Useful information page. Or, you can visit the Issues page which lists all published editions of The Tactile Times. You can also subscribe to the Tactile Times to receive issues by email when they are published. Or, if you like technology and football, why not take a look at the Fantasy football area of the website? If you need to get in touch with us, visit the Contact us page to email us.
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