Braille

“Braille made it a pleasure for me to read the world around me shone afresh with treasures” by Helen Keller. How is braille important to the society, and what is the background of braille? Louis Braille invented braille in the year 1829. Braille helps blind people and people that have low vision to read, write and be more independent. Braille is not a language, rather, It’s a code for the people that have low vision and who are blind, so they can learn information about books and various subjects.

When you look at braille, it looks like a bunch of raised dots, but each dot represents a symbol of a number. The dots on the paper, are called braille cells. People with low vision or are blind can read braille by moving their hands on the words that are in braille. Blind and low vision people read braille by touch not by sight, and they mainly use there index fingers to read braille.

Louis Braille was born in Coupvray, France or a small village next to Paris, on January 4,1809. One day, when Louis was three years old and he was playing in his father workshop. Young Louis got struck in his eye by a awl, (An awl is a pointed stick, which is used to punch holds in leather and wood.) But week after the incident, an eye infection took Louis sight away.

When Louis was ten years old he was excepted to the Royal Institute for Bind Youth in Paris, which was the world’s first school for the blind. In the school in Paris, they only had fourteen books, that had raised words. Books, that have raised words back then, were very expensive, still as today. When Louis was fifteen he created a system of reading and writing by raised dots. Louis got the idea of the braille system by Charles Barbier, who invented a night code, for which the french army could read the code, with out speaking a word to each other. The code was made by twelve dots and dashes, which the solider would read by touch. Louis Braille made his first alphabet, that was made into six dots, that were raised, by an awl, that which toke his sight away, when he was three years old.

When Louis was nineteen he accepted a teaching position at the National Institute of Blind Youth. During most of his adulthood he had suffered from sickness. Louis died in 1852 at the age of forty-three years old. Louis died from tuberculosis, which is a disease that can infect any part of the body. But Louis was infected in the lungs which was the most dangerous organ that a disease can attack. In 1990, Braille was being use all over the world. But in 1952 Louis was finally recognized as a national hero in France. They deported Louis’s body to Paris, and he was buried in the Pantheon where the greatest French achievers are honored.