Braille was invented by a nineteenth century man named Louis Braille, who was completely
blind.
Braille’s story starts when he was three years old.
He was playing in his father’s shop in Coupvray, France, and somehow managed to injure his
eye.
Though he was offered the best medical attention available at the time, it wasn’t enough—an
infection soon developed and spread to his other eye, rendering him blind in both eyes.
While a tragedy for him, had this accident not happened, we wouldn’t have braille today.
There was a system of reading in place for the blind at the time, which consisted of
tracing a finger along raised letters.
However, this system meant that reading was painfully slow and it was difficult to discerning
by touch the relatively complex letters of the alphabet.
As a result, many people struggled to master the embossed letter system.
braille-alphabetIn 1821, Braille’s teacher, Dr. Alexandre Francois-Rene Pignier, invited
a man named Charles Barbier to speak to a classroom of young blind students at the National
Institute for Blind Youth in Paris.
Barbier had developed a “night writing” system for the military using raised dots
after Napoleon requested a system of communication that soldiers could use even in darkness without
making any sound in the process.
Barbier’s system was too complex for the military and was rejected.
However, it was thought that it might be useful for the blind, which led Dr. Pignier to invite
Barbier to come demonstrate it.
As it stood, the Barbier invention wasn’t quite up to functioning as a system of touch-based
reading and writing, being overly complex (using a 6×6 dot matrix to represent letters
and certain phonemes).
Further, this large dot matrix made it so unless you had very large fingertips, you
couldn’t feel all the dots in a single matrix without moving your finger.
Still, Braille was inspired and, as a young teenager, he began experimenting.
He took a piece of paper, a slate, and a stylus, punching holes and attempting to find something
that worked.
In 1825, Braille was just barely sixteen, but he thought he had hit upon something that
was functional and superior to the existing embossed letter system.
His original code consisted of six dots arranged in two parallel rows, each set of rows representing
a letter.
This configuration was simpler than Barbier’s system, but still versatile enough to allow
for up to 64 variations, enough for all the letters of the alphabet and punctuation.
It was also easily adapted to languages other than French.
Most importantly, rather than needing to trace out a whole letter, it was much easier to
feel the configuration of dots, making reading for the blind significantly faster and easier.
Dr. Pignier was pleased with Braille’s work and encouraged his students to use Braille’s
new system.
Unfortunately when Dr. Pignier introduced The History of France written in braille for
his students, he was dismissed from his position as headmaster, due to his insistence on pushing
Braille’s system rather than the standard embossed letter system of the day.
Nonetheless, Braille himself became a teacher at the Institute and taught his code to the
students who passed through, spreading the knowledge.
In 1834, when Braille was in his mid-20s, he was invited to demonstrate the uses of
braille at the Exposition of Industry, which was being held in Paris that year, further
spurring its popularity.
By this time, Braille had also published a book about how to use the code.
It was mostly written in embossed letters with braille thrown in to demonstrate its
use.
Despite this, the National Institute for Blind Youth that Braille worked at still refused
to officially adopt his system.
It wouldn’t be until 1854, two years after Braille died and eight years after a school
in Amsterdam started using it as their primary reading/writing system, that Braille’s former
school finally adopted braille due to students overwhelmingly demanding the change.
By the late nineteenth century, braille had been adopted throughout most of the world,
excepting the United States, who held out until 1916.
These days, books for the blind in English are typically written in Grade 2 braille.
It is a system that combines letters and substitutes letters for words.
For instance, the letter “y” is used to represent the word “you” and the letter
“b” represents the word “but”.
In some respects, Grade 2 braille is a lot like “chatspeak” and takes shortcuts to
make for an easier reading and writing experience.
In addition to taking a shorter time to read, it also takes up less space, saving paper
used on braille books.
Today, English speaking blind children are mostly taught Grade 2 braille, though Grade
1 braille (every letter written out) is still sometimes taught in early elementary school.
There is also a Grade 3 braille for any non-standard shorthands.