Anyone looking to buy fortune cookies in braille, I can tell you where to get them. Turns out the one place in the world embossing the fortunes and bringing them to a shop in Chinatown to get them made into cookies is right here in our midst…
The California School for the Blind just turned 150 years old, though many in the Bay Area probably don’t know the state magnet school is right here in Fremont. The school draws young people with visual impairments from all over California. The 80 full-time students live on campus during the week and go home on the weekends.
I visited the campus to do a story about The Rocket Shop — the school’s student-run cafe that just won an award from the state. Besides being stocked with lunch and snack food, it sells T-shirts in braille, and, yes, their Lucky Touch fortune cookies — another student-run program.
The Rocket Shop opened two years ago as a vocational training program to teach kids about the assistive technologies and social skills needed to run a retail establishment. Here’s a video of Eduardo Mendez demonstrating the school’s talking cash register and bill reader: