Who invented braille alphabet

Some of its characters were six dots tall. Louis Braille realized that the same basic idea could give blind people an efficient method for reading and writing. He used this cell to create an alphabet using tactile dots and dashes. Braille is named after its creator, Louis Braille, a Frenchman who lost his sight as a result of a childhood accident.

Louis Braille lived in the French village of Coupvray. Born in , he was the fourth child of a harness maker and his wife. Louis was a bright and curious child. He especially enjoyed watching his father at work.

Unfortunately, he injured his eye. It became infected and when Louis touched the uninjured eye, the infection spread, blinding him. Each dot or combination of dots within the cell stood for a letter or a phonetic sound. The problem with the military code was that the human fingertip could not feel all the dots with one touch. Louis Braille created a reading method based on a cell of six dots.

This crucial improvement meant that a fingertip could encompass the entire cell unit with one impression and move rapidly from one cell to the next. The system of embossed writing invented by Louis Braille gradually came to be accepted throughout the world as the fundamental form of written communication for blind individuals, and it remains basically as he invented it.

Over time, there has been some modification of the braille system, particularly the addition of contractions representing groups of letters or whole words that appear frequently in a language. The use of contractions permits faster braille reading and helps reduce the size of braille books, making them less cumbersome.

Several groups have been established over the last century to modify and standardize the braille code. A major goal is to develop easily understood contractions without making the code too complex.

Unfortunately when Dr. Nonetheless, Braille himself became a teacher at the Institute and taught his code to the students who passed through, spreading the knowledge. In , when Braille was in his mids, 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.