Creating Those Special Dots

Creating Those Special Dots

One of the most important components of Lutheran Braille Workers’ are the beautiful zinc plates which are instrumental in the creation of Braille pages. By placing a piece of special paper between the plates and running them through a Braille press, the life-saving Braille dots are embossed on both sides of every page. Yet for years, Lutheran Braille Workers has been trying to create these plates on old Plate Embossing Devices—specialized machines which come from Europe and have to be made one by one. Unfortunately, these machines were becoming too old to function properly and were using outdated computer software. Considering each Braille Bible contains over 3,000 plates, this is incredibly important technology for our ministry.

Beginning with an incredibly generous grant from the National Lutheran Women’s Missionary League (LWML) of $100,000, LBW began a campaign in 2019 in an effort to raise the $330,000 required to purchase a new PUMA Plate Embossing Device (PED), cover the cost of shipping, installation, and training, and purchase new plates and other required supplies. This campaign, which started among the volunteers of our Ministry Production Centers nationwide, was called Buy-A-Dot.

We are excited to announce that through the incredible support of our volunteers and their churches, we have raised an additional $143,000 in the past year and a half. This generous funding has allowed LBW to purchase the PED and have it installed earlier this year by a technician from Germany. Despite some challenges with adapting our ministry to new technology, new plates have already been produced on the PED, even during the COVID pandemic.

LBW is in the final stages of the campaign and hopes to raise the remaining $87,000 by next spring. These funds will help purchase additional plates which will be used by our volunteers, new computers and software to run the PED, and other supplies necessary to the production of Braille materials.

Your financial support is literally producing the millions of dots embossed every single year and distributed around the world. Your support of the Buy-A-Dot campaign is important for the continued production of Bibles in Braille which goes to men, women, and children who are Blind or Visually Impaired.