Inmates produce braille textbooks for visually impaired

The James T. Vaughn Correctional Center’s sprawling campus east of Smyrna houses 2,500 men at any given time. Many have prison industry jobs, but only a handful get to spend their days in Building B.

There, 11 men meticulously peck away at keyboards, filling a screen in front of them with a series of staggered dots.

It’s a visual representation of what Homer’s Iliad or a Spanish textbook will look and feel like when it’s eventually embossed in Braille.

The program partners with the state Division of the Visually Impaired to crank out these materials requested by the 15 school-aged Braille readers in Delaware.

It’s produced nearly 370,000 pages of Braille since its inception in 1989 and more than 510,000 pages of large-print since 2001 for those who retain some vision.

Before the program began, the state relied on volunteers to do the job.

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