By Daniel Wirtheim, Features Editor

Published in print Jan 14, 2015.

Set in a large brick building on Lee Street, Industries of the Blind (IOB) makes equipment for the U.S. Government.

Inside, rows of workers push cloth through machines, spin mop-tops onto wooden handles and assemble immense quantities of ballpoint pens.

The sense of normalcy at IOB can be overwhelming when a person considers that each employee fits somewhere on the spectrum of blindness.

“It’s not what you’re thinking,” said Richard Oliver, the Directory of Marketing and Sales at IOB. “A lot of these people are legally blind, which only means they can’t see at the level a sighted person can.”

For the blind, special pieces have been added to sewing machines, to help align fabric correctly. Fancy audio systems or other technological aids are unnecessary. Some of the fixes required to make a machine usable to a blind worker may be a small piece of metal costing $3.

Walking paths through the factory are directed by textured strips, which signal to a worker when they are in the walking lane.

Movement throughout the factory is natural, no one second-guesses what they are doing and there are no service animals inside.

The factory is divided into about eight sections with each focusing on a different product. In most sections, there is at least one sighted worker, but in some sections, a line of production is made of 100 percent blind individuals. One such group makes the factory’s famous Skilcraft pen, a beautifully designed piece of equipment distributed to military personnel.

The pen is composed of a brass ink tube and a plastic barrel. The pen is designed to pass 16 pages of government specifications.

They must sustain under extreme temperature changes, fit in the arm-pockets of flight jackets and carry enough ink to write for one mile.

To measure the mile, a pen is place in a holder, which then lowers the tip onto a moving roll of paper.

Most impressive of all is that the barrel of the pen is the perfect shape to be used in performing tracheotomies, and has been advertised as a useful tool in military training videos.

A small poster hangs on a wall of the pen-production room that reads, “We keep America writing.” It seems ironic that the assemblers of the Skilcraft pens will never be able to use what they create, or even read the poster itself.

Although technology threatens to make the ballpoint pen obsolete, IOB continues to make the same pen they have for almost 40 years. Products made at IOB are not outsourced; they are sold almost exclusively to U.S. Government suppliers.

This is due, at least in part, to the 1938 Wagner-O’Day Act, which requires the military to buy certain items made by the blind.

In foreign lands, the Skilcraft pen may not be mightier than the sword, or the assault rifle. But tucked into a flight jacket, the Skilcraft pen stands as a beacon for American ingenuity and good, fair labor coming from the most unlikely of sources.