Engineering students at the University of St. Thomas are working to help almost 90,000 blind and visually impaired people in Minnesota.
Students have spent the last three years writing software and designing a machine that can help recreate images from braille textbooks.
Experts say it can cost up to $25,000 to convert an elementary school textbook to braille.
Converting the diagrams for those textbooks is much more difficult.
3-D pictures, called tactile graphics, are often handmade. There are 40,000 of them stored at State Services for the Blind (SSB) of Minnesota in St. Paul.