Did you know?

All official educational texts and AIDS for legally blind students come from Louisville?

The American Printing House for the Blind is the only federally funded source for these materials for blind or low vision people in the US.

Now they're expanding in a big way.

Kentucky Editions Kelcey Starks gives us an inside look at the plans.

The American Printing House for the Blind has been in operation since 1858 and so it has changed a lot since then.

But to celebrate its 165th anniversary, it may be going through one of its biggest changes yet.

And Dr. Craig Metter is here to tell us all about it.

Thank you so much for being here.

He's the president of the American Printing House for the Blind.

And for those who may not know what you will do, explain.

All right.

Wow.

Do this really briefly.

American Printing House for the Blind was founded in 1858 by a group of concerned Kentuckians who who felt that their print should be available to blind individuals.

So they took it upon themselves to basically lobby the entire country, asking state by state for small portions of money so they could produce at that time, which was raised prints.

And then one of these great American stories in 1879, the U.S. Congress said this is a worthwhile effort and we're going to start funding it yearly out of the federal budget.

And so we've been federally supported since 1879, and in it is a national resource for the entire country.

The big news, though, is this expansion project, 100,000 square feet of new construction.

That's four times your house.

Current area size, including a new museum, which is going to be called the DOT experience.

So explain what that's all about.

So the DOT experience will be the name of the new museum for those who have been to the American Printing House for the Blind, you probably visited our museum and it is a very unique museum which basically focuses on the growth of education through the ages.

And we have some amazing treasures there.

We have one of the six.

There are only six books remaining to this day that were actually produced by Louis Braille himself.

We are we have one of those copies, and it's the only one that's on permanent display.

Yeah, we have the Helen Keller archives.

So we have everything in there from Helen's Oscar to the letter that she wrote, scolding the Hitler Youth for burning her books to her correspondence with Mark Twain, the Roosevelts.

And it just goes on and on and on.

Stevie Wonder's piano that he played when he was a student at the Michigan School for the Blind.

So what we want to have happen in this museum is, first of all, is create this experience.

We're going to call it an experience, but make this the most accessible experience museum in the world.

So it doesn't matter if you are ambulatory impaired, if you are blind, low vision, if you're deaf, if you're deaf blind, if you have a sensory need that we'll be able to create and an experience for you that will meet your needs where you're at.

It will be fully accessible, fully inclusive.

And so that's our goal.

But the main goal is we want to introduce you to what blindness and low vision truly is.

We appreciate it so much.

And those museum renovations will begin this spring with a reopening planned for 2025.

Thank you, Kelsey.

Something to look forward to.