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Devin, who’s been at NBP for nearly 30 years, has been blind since birth. While it’s not a prerequisite for a proofreader to be a lifelong Braille reader, he says, "you have to be good. We all were born blind and learned it in school. If you happen to have lost your sight and learn Braille, you could do that. But that’s tough. When you learn Braille, there’s a whole sensitivity training for your fingers that gets your pathways built up so you’ll really be able to ‘see’ the Braille. The earlier you start using it, the better. Just like a language."

Bill Maling, who’s been at NBP since 1980 and operates the plate-embossing device (PED), has some sight. He sometimes needs to tilt his head a little to read the information scrolling past on the monitors, and he wears thick-lensed glasses, through which he peers out from beneath a riot of long hair. He tells me there are only about 40 PEDs in the whole country (they cost nearly $100,000 apiece).

All day long, Maling feeds zinc plates, about the size of legal-size paper, into the PEDs. As they roll through, they’re imprinted with the same Braille patterns that were on Hirshson’s computer screen. Feeding them through a second time imprints the other side, making the pages double-sided. A proof page of Braille is born when Maling simply runs the plate, along with a page of heavy-stock paper, through an old washing press. Each page takes about 30 seconds; doing proofs for a whole book might take a day or two.

When a book has been proofed and double-proofed, it’s time to print it for real. In NBP’s basement, pressman Gene O’Neill, who is sighted, oversees four presses that churn out about 2000 pages per hour. The mammoth machines were built back in the early ’60s, but O’Neill says he’s only had to make one service call. ("They’re indestructible ... the Mercedes of printing presses.") Most Braille is run off on 80-pound paper called end leaf — it has to be sturdy enough to hold Braille, but soft enough for fingers.

It may sometimes be a bit boring to stack and sort pages all day long, but collator Elizabeth Bouvier doesn’t show it. Standing in the cavernous collating room, surrounded by stacks and stacks of off-white, heavy-stock Braille pages, she rhapsodizes about the variety in her job, the fact that she deals with different and interesting titles all the time. Near her is a pile of Braille menus bound for Friendly’s, and several hundred copies of Our Special, NBP’s in-house magazine. But Bouvier is really looking forward to next week, when she’ll be collating a book of recipes for drinks like daiquiris and mudslides. "The fun really flies when you’re a drunk blind person with a blender," she says. "I walk better when I’m drunk. I walk straight!"

Bouvier has been at National Braille Press for more than a decade. She wasn’t born blind; she started losing her sight at 22 and is gradually losing more and more. She says working at NBP made sense; besides the income it provides, it’s offered her the opportunity to learn the skills for a life without sight. "I’m learning Braille now. It’s been a struggle, but I wanted to label my CDs." She hasn’t quite gotten the hang of using her Brailler, and has mislabeled some titles in her library of show tunes. But, she laughs, "even ‘Jello Dolly’ is better than nothing."

SO, WHITHER BRAILLE? It ain’t going nowhere. Amy Ruell heads up the National Braille Press’s ReadBooks! program — an effort to educate the parents of blind children about the importance of reading — and is especially tuned in to the latest technology. She remembers that "as a child, I did not have Braille books I could keep," and that the Braille books she used for school were "very bulky. I probably have back problems today in part because I had to carry so many books."

Those days are over. Ruell says that, far from supplanting Braille, new technologies are complementing and enhancing it, making it more vital. As an example, she cites her Braille note taker, a device about the size of a VHS cassette, onto which she can download as many as 2000 Braille books as electronic files; she then reads them via the machine’s refreshable Braille display. "There’s so much more available electronically now, with the advent of electronic books and computer files," she says. "This makes Braille all the more powerful. It’s incredible, the breadth and quantity of material that’s now available. It used to be that people were constrained by what was produced by the Library of Congress or what they could purchase. Now, because of these note takers and electronic files, we have more access to things we can physically read."

"What it boils down to, in a basic way, is Braille being equivalent to print," says Tanya Holton. "Sighted people want access to as much information as they can, in as many media as they can, whether that be a book on tape when they’re driving in the car, or a magazine at the beach, or a hardcover book when they’re curled up at home, or the Internet on their laptop. So there are lots of different ways a sighted person gets their information, and the same is true for a blind person. The difference is only that it’s easier for a sighted person to get information than [for] a blind person to get access to information.

"Blind people can get access to the hard news on the radio or TV. They can get access to all sorts of books on tape, or other media like downloadable books on the Internet. What we focus on is blind people who want to actively read rather than passively listen."

"Braille will continue to be a modern and powerful tool," echoes Ruell, "if enough energy and resources are devoted to helping children and adults learn to use it."

National Braille Press is located at 88 Saint Stephen Street, in Boston. Free tours are available with reservations. Call (617) 266-6160, or visit www.nbp.org. Mike Miliard can be reached at mmiliard[a]phx.com