Louis Braille, a cobbler's son born near Paris in 1809, lost his sight in early childhood after an accident with one of his father's tools. He went to school in Paris where he learned to read embossed type and, remaining there as a teacher, perfected a system that could be both read and written by blind people.
In Louis Braille's lifetime there were over 20 different systems of embossed type, most of which were invented by sighted people. They were often easier to read by sight than by touch and usually could only be produced in a printing house. This meant that blind people had no means of writing for themselves.
In 1821, a soldier named Charles Barbier visited Louis' school. He brought with him a system he had invented called "night writing". Night writing had originally been designed so that soldiers could pass instructions along trenches at night without having to talk and give their positions away. It consisted of twelve raised dots, which could be combined to represent different sounds. Unfortunately it proved to be too complex and was rejected by the army.
Louis realised how useful this system of raised dots could be, provided it was simplified. He experimented until he found an ideal system using six dots. He continued to work on the scheme for several years, developing separate codes for maths and music. In 1827 the first book in Braille was published.
The new system did not catch on immediately. Sighted people did not understand how useful Braille could be and one head teacher even banned the children from learning it. Fortunately this seemed to have the effect of encouraging the children even more and they took to learning it in secret. Eventually even sighted people began to realise the benefits of the new system.
Not only could people with sight problems read Braille but they could also write it for themselves using a simple stylus to make the dots. For the first time blind and partially sighted people began to be truly independent and to take control of their own lives
The system he invented is based on six dots, like the design on a domino: They can be used simply to produce a letter-by-letter copy of print. This is known as Grade 1 or uncontracted Braille. It takes up a lot of space and is comparatively slow to read.
Grade 2 Braille was developed to reduce the size of books and make reading quicker. More symbols are used to represent common letter combinations and two symbols together are used to represent some words, Depending on how they are spaced some characters may change their meaning.
