LIVONIA, Mich. – March is Reading Month, and Local 4 often discusses the importance of children’s reading -- but let’s not forget how essential books are for visually impaired children.
On Friday, March 29, we traveled to Livonia, where a Metro Detroit nonprofit makes braille books for children. It’s an expensive and tedious process to make the books, but even still finding a way to give them away for free to children who need them.
We’ve all seen those books before, like Cat in the Hat, but these books are different. Braille books are made at Seedlings Braille Books in Livonia and shipped worldwide.
A braille writer is like a typewriter for braille books, and it’s how founder Debra Bonde first started making braille books for children when she started seedlings in the 1980s.
“I had no idea when I started,” said Bonde. “I started in a humble basement, and we had 12 titles available and sent out 200 the first year and then last year, we sent out 48,000 books all over the world.”
Thousands of braille books were sent to children like Khara Gilmore, born with sipto optic dysplasia.
“I have no light perception, my eyes can’t take any light,” said Gilmore. “When I’m reading a book, I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s what they look like. Oh, that’s what that looks like.’”
Each year, Seedlings provides five free books to children in the United States and Canada who are visually impaired, which is significant because most braille books are really expensive because of the labor that goes into making them.
“So it’s very technical, and there’s a bunch of pins that go in, up and down on the pages that make indents on the page to make the braille actually tactile,” said Seedlings Assistant Director Amanda Herulca.
It has the technology to print on both sides, and Hercula showed us what it takes to print a longer children’s book.
“These machines are designed so specifically so those dots are slightly offset so they’re not going to line up one another and make any kind of confusion there,” Herulca said. “You can imagine carrying around that in your backpack is a lot different than carrying around a print book.”
Shorter books like those are purchased in bulk from the publisher. The braille is then printed on clear sticker paper.
“So they come off big long strips or sheets rather that are all attached, then we have staff members that cut them into individual pieces for each page,” Herulca said.
Then, each volunteer places the braille on the corresponding page. It’s a lot of labor but thanks to many many donations and a lot of volunteer work, Seedlings is able to make a book for $10.
“Like, if you just donate $10 even if you have like $5 just do that,” Gilmore said. “Just do that. It doesn’t matter what you donate. It could come into somebody getting a book.”
For Gilmore, those $10 donations gave her the gift of children’s books, which has allowed her to see the world through the eyes of many marvelous authors.
In honor of March being Reading Month, Seedlings launched a free program called Braille for beginners, which teaches braille to parents who have children who are visually impaired and provides families with free braille books.
You can donate to Seedlings on its official website here.