Visually impaired man publishes Quran in braille

Adil Altınkaya is visually impaired, but that did has not stopped him from publishing the Quran in braille for the blind and visually impaired for almost 20 years. Speaking to Anadolu Agency (AA), Altınkaya said he had decided to do something for other blind people after he graduated from university. "I heard a Quran in braille for the blind is published in Saudi Arabia. I thought it over and brought a machine to publish it in 1980, but it failed," he said. Altınkaya tried again and published some parts of the Quran while he was living in Antalya. "I established a business to publish the Quran in braille in the 1990s. Five years later I bought a braille embosser and began to publish the Quran. So far, we have published around 3,000 Qurans." Living in Antalya, Altınkaya said he comes to Istanbul for two or three months a year for the publishing process. He said they mostly focus on printing religious texts in braille. To publish a Quran in braille, they first use its digital format and design a layout. "I can put between 40 and 42 letters in a line and a page can have 26 lines at most. We can publish around 800 pages in an hour. We later arrange them and then bind them," he said. Altınkaya attended a school for the blind in Gaziantep and later studied at a university in Ankara. He graduated from Hacettepe University's Department of Linguistics in 1980.