Seedlings: Braille Books for Children
Reported by Erik Smith

A few moments with a good book, always precious time, are perhaps too often taken for granted. For a child without sight, they are moments perhaps never to be realized.

Books, of course, were once written only for their ears to hear. There were books in Braille, costly books, but they were mainly for adults.

Twenty years ago, a painfully shy young Detroit woman named Deborah was searching her soul for a special purpose and found it. She found it in the little raised bumps of the symbols of Braille

"I got more and more stories about the need for Braille and how frustrated parents and teachers were not being able to get affordable Braille books for the kids, and so this idea was born about starting a nonprofit where we could make some of that wonderful literature that's available for sighted kids available and accessible to the blind kids," she said.

Deborah began her mission to put children's books in the hands and minds of children without sight.

"Regular print books that you'd find in a bookstore for sighted kids, we take and add the Braille to them on clear plastic so the blind and sighted family members can read together," she said. "It's so important to get started at an early age. The major building block of education is to be able to read and if you don't have fun books to read when you're a kid, you're going to have real trouble with the textbooks in school."

Today, Deborah's dream is known around the world as Seedlings, Braille Books for Children. Her cramped Livonia office clatters away as sophisticated printers spew hundreds of pages of text each day, bringing the delight of reading to the families of sightless children everywhere. They do it at a cost that barely covers the expense of producing the books. And that's the point of Seedlings.

"We'd love to be able to give the books away, but then we'd be fundraising all the time," she said. "So what we do is we sell the books, but we sell them for about half of what it costs us to make them. We make up the rest with grants and donations and fundraising events. That seems to work pretty well."

Each day volunteers answer the call at Seedlings, whether they're proofreading or packaging. There are so many jobs to be done.

In her very first year, Deborah produced just 200 books. Now she has added over 75,000. Demand may always exceed the supply, but Deborah can see beyond the veil of the sightless and into the minds of her special children who yearn to learn through the words they find at the end of their fingertips.

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