Joyce Van Tuyl’s life work began in the 1950s with a newspaper story. Her job may be ending this week, but not her work.

Half a century ago, her local paper in Santa Clara County, Calif., wrote about the lack of Braille texts for blind students being integrated into classrooms with sighted children.

The story also mentioned an evening class in Braille transcription that caught Joyce’s interest. She took the class and practiced two hours a day while her younger child was in kindergarten.

Two years later Joyce became the teacher.

Joyce’s children are long grown, in fact she now has five grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren, but she is still a Braillist, and will be after her job at the Washington Talking Book and Braille Library ends on Feb. 12.

Even though Joyce will be 85 next fall, she is not retiring by choice, rather as a victim of severe state budget cuts.

It is an emerging theme I wrote last week in a piece about Simone Vilandre, who is starting a new career at age 60.

That was Joyce Van Tuyl’s age when she moved from California to take a job at the Washington Talking Book and Braille Library.

Joyce’s specialty is translating mathematics and science. She has a degree in chemical engineering from the University of Michigan.

She has been in Seattle, and the library, for 25 years, and a beloved member of her late-husband’s family, who are longtime Ballard residents.

Ever since that first class, Braille transcription has consumed Joyce’s life, even though she was more often a volunteer than a paid employee in the early years.

One math teacher at a school where she volunteered would telephone from home to dictate the math test, and Joyce would have it transcribed by the time she arrived at school.

When Joyce began transcribing Braille in the 50s, it was done with slate and a stylus, punching in the dots backwards so that they could be read correctly on the reverse side.

In the early days of transcription, a single error on a sheet meant starting over from scratch. Now she uses a computer and says her two favorite words in the English language are “insert” and “delete.”

Although special software aids transcription greatly, computers are not infallible.

A computer tracks letters rather than context. Joyce cited the example of the computer transcribing “chemotherapy” using the symbol for “mother.”

Joyce loves teaching others transcription and plans to offer classes, with an emphasis on math code, after her job ends.

She is purchasing a new computer for her Sunset West apartment in order to continue her work.

In her 25 years with the library, she has always had at least 25 volunteers working at home. There are more than 400 volunteers working with the library, 40 in her department.

The library has upwards of 11,000 patrons, but Joyce points out there are likely double that many people in the state who do not even know they could benefit from the library’s services.

Services for the blind were first developed for World War II veterans and then expanded to other visually-impaired persons, from causes as varied as macular degeneration, side effects of diabetes, glaucoma and even Parkinson’s Disease due to tremors.

Joyce had been considering retirement but would have liked to have it be on her time schedule. Now she is scrambling to prepare for the consequences of unemployment, such as the need to apply for Medicare.

She will not be idle nor does she plan to leave Washington, even though all her offspring are elsewhere.

Joyce feels adopted by her late-husband’s family. “I will never leave Seattle as long as my sister-in-law is here," she said.

Joyce can foresee some advantages, such as driving her car less and perhaps less frustration over the lack of bus service along Seaview Avenue Northwest, to no longer commuting to the library located at Ninth Avenue at the northeast edge of downtown Seattle.

She also looks forward to choosing what to read rather than working on transcribing as many as 20 books at one time.

Perhaps she’ll have more time to socialize at Sunset West. As it is, all she claims that she does is eat and sleep there; her job has been all consuming.

But, transcribing Braille is still her passion, and she is not going to stop doing what she loves to do.

Joyce reads by touch and she reads with her eyes, “It’s all the same to me.”

What will not be the same after Feb. 12: the Washington Talking Book and Braille Library.

Joyce has more than 60 years of experience coded in her brain and her fingertips. She will prove irreplaceable.

The Washington Talking Book and Braille Library is located at 2029 Ninth Ave. Their Web site is www.wtbbl.org.