Dorina Nowill – Google Doodle pays tribute to activist and creator of the “Foundation for the Book of the Blind in Brazil”

Today’s Google Doodle celebrates the 100th birthday of Brazilian educator and advocate Dorina de Gouvêa Nowill, whose eager endeavors made Brazil more responsive to the necessities of blind. The Doodle of this day May 28 pays a simple and excellent tribute to Dorina Nowill who was a significant name of Brazil and was involved with different social causes.

Who is Dorina Nowill?

Dorina Nowill was born in the city of São Paulo on May 28, 1919 and died in a same city on August 28, 2010. She was a significant educator, philanthropist and administrator in Brazil.

She graduated as a teacher and endeavored to make and actualize institutions, laws and battles to profit the visually impaired, because of her continuous work looking for development for this community, Dorina Nowill was perceived and got a few awards.

Dorina Nowill goes blind

Dorina Nowill became blind at age 17 in light of an eye infection that caused bleeding. Indeed, even with visual deficiency, the teacher did not feel restricted and followed the career she had dreamed of. In the time of 1945 she managed with the Caetano de Campos School to embed a specialization course for educators showing the blind.

As the first blind student to join up with a regular school in São Paulo, she found it was hard to discover the books she required. Therefore, she started advocating for all students’ access to culture and information. Turning into an educator at her place of graduation, Dorina Nowill actualized training for education of the blind and won a scholarship to facilitate her studies at Columbia University in the United States. In 1946 she and a few companions set up the Foundation for the Book of the Blind in Brazil with the nation’s first huge Braille press, enrolling volunteers to transcribe various publications.

In the wake of attempting to establish the Department of Special Education for the Blind, Dorina Nowill helped pass a law ensuring visually impaired individuals’ entitlement to an education. Such achievements prompted new opportunities on a more extensive scale. Elected president of the World Council of the Blind in 1979, she proceeded to talk at the United Nations General Assembly and battled for the formation of the Latin American Union of the Blind.

Dorina Nowill Foundation for the Blind

The performance of the educator was great to the point that today there is a foundation that takes its name, being a not-for-profit association and that has philanthropic character.

Having won various philanthropic awards, Dorina Nowill’s legacy lives on in the work of her not-for-profit association, Fundação Dorina Nowill, which prints braille editions for Brazil’s Ministry of Education as well as everything from menus to aircraft safety cards. The foundation additionally circulates audio and digitally accessible books to schools and libraries all over Brazil, guaranteeing the equitable and comprehensive society that Dorina Nowill anticipated.

“For more than 70 years, we have been dedicated to the social inclusion of people with visual impairment. One of the ways we do this is through the free production and distribution of Braille, spoken and digital books, directly to the public and also to around 3000 schools, libraries and organizations from all over Brazil,” says the great screen from the association’s site.