Bicentenary Of Louis Braille The World At Our Fingertips

This year marks the bicentenary of the birth of Louis Braille - the man who created a raised-dot system of reading and writing that changed the lives of millions of blind and visually-impaired people.

Louis Braille was born in Coupvray, near Paris, on January 4, 1809. An injury to his left eye at his father's harness-making workshop left him blind in that eye at the age of three. The injury caused an infection that spread to his right eye, leaving him completely blind two years later.

He received a scholarship to study science and music at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris and became a talented cellist and organist. But his was an exceptional case as, at the time, blind students were usually taught basic craft and trade skills, such as wicker-work or shoemaking, so they could earn a living after completing school.

Inventing braille

At that time, the Royal Institute, founded by Valentin Haüy, used a reading system based on the Haüy method, an arrangement of copper wires pressed into the large print text of books. The books were extremely heavy and difficult to carry and had two other major disadvantages: they did not help blind students learn to write and were very expensive.

In 1821, Charles Barbier - an artillery officer who had invented an adapted night writing procedure, a basic point method that allowed soldiers to communicate without speaking - visited the Royal Institute to demonstrate his method. He used 12-dot arrangements in a rectangle to represent sounds. The method caught the interest of the young Louis Braille.

Over the next three years, Louis Braille started teaching at the Royal Institute and devoted his spare time to improving Barbier's system. He changed the number of dots to six with each arrangement corresponding to a letter. Using his father's stitching awl, the very instrument that had blinded him, he completed his raised-dot system at the age of 15, in 1824. Braille characters consist of six tactile dots arranged in two columns and three rows that can form 64 combinations, mapping letters, numbers and symbols.

In 1829, Louis Braille invented a six-dot musical notation system and published his first book in braille, Method of Writing Words, Music, and Plain Songs by Means of Dots, for Use by the Blind and Arranged for Them. He continued to further refine and improve the system over the...