By using the braille alphabet , people who are blind can review and study the written word. They can also become aware of different written conventions such as spelling, punctuation, paragraphing and footnotes. Most importantly, braille gives blind individuals access to a wide range of reading materials including recreational and educational reading, financial statements and restaurant menus. Equally important are contracts, regulations, insurance policies, directories, and cookbooks that are all part of daily adult life.
Through braille, people who are blind can also pursue hobbies and cultural enrichment with materials such as music scores, hymnals, playing cards, and board games.
Various other methods had been attempted over the years to enable reading for the blind. However, many of them were raised versions of print letters. It is generally accepted that the braille system has succeeded because it is based on a rational sequence of signs devised for the fingertips, rather than imitating signs devised for the eyes.
The history of braille goes all the way back to the early s. As a military veteran, Barbier saw several soldiers killed because they used lamps after dark to read combat messages. As a result of the light shining from the lamps, enemy combatants knew where the French soldiers were and inevitably led to the loss of many men. Louis thought he would try to punch a hole in a piece of leather just like his father did.
He grabbed the tool and tried to push it through the leather. He didn't have the strength of his father. He tried again, pushing harder. The tool slipped from his hand and flew up and into his left eye. Louis screamed with pain. His parents, two sisters and brother ran to help him. They put a cloth over his eye. There was no hospital in Coupvray. The closest doctor was very far away. They took Louis to a woman in the village who used herbal medicines to treat injuries and sicknesses.
She dipped a cloth bandage in a wet herbal solution and placed it on Louis' eye. But his injured eye became infected and the infection spread to his other eye. Within a short time, Louis lost sight in both eyes and was permanently blind.
At that time, most people who were blind were helpless. They had to depend on others. Only the wealthy or those of a high position had any hope of getting an education or earning a decent living. Many ended up becoming beggars. The story so far: At age 3, Louis Braille became blind after playing with a tool in his father's harness shop. Braille carved a small wooden cane for Louis to help the boy feel things that were ahead of him when he walked.
When Louis was 6, a new priest came to town. The priest gave Louis lessons for a year, but Louis wanted to go to the village school with the other children. So a classmate agreed to pick him up each morning and lead him to school. Louis listened to the teacher and memorized what he heard. Even though he couldn't read or write, he was the best student in the class.
He studied there for three years. At times Louis was frustrated because he could not read or write. The priest and the principal thought Louis would do better in a school for blind students. It was in Paris, 25 miles away. Louis' parents were reluctant to let him go away from home. He was only 10 and the school was very expensive.
The priest persuaded his parents to apply. The school accepted Louis and even paid for him to go to class and live there. The school was in a rundown old building.
It was damp and dark, and the students were given very little food. After his classes, Louis learned to play the cello and the piano. He couldn't read music, but he memorized the notes. Louis was looking forward to learning to read.
Unfortunately, there were very few books available for blind students. They were printed on heavy, waxed paper. The letters were formed by pressing the paper onto pieces of lead that were shaped like the letters of the alphabet. This process was called embossing. The books were very heavy. One sentence could take up a whole page.
Louis learned to run his fingers over the pages so that he could feel each letter. It took a long time to read this way. By the time he got to the end of a sentence, he would forget the words at the beginning.
The story so far: Louis Braille studied at a school for blind students where the few books made for the blind were heavy and hard to read. He had invented a way for soldiers to send messages to each other at night without needing light or having to talk. Though we do not have statistics from the Napoleonic Wars in which Barbier fought, statistics from the American Civil War suggest how devastatingly common eye injuries were. An even more prevalent cause of blindness was trachoma.
Tens of thousands of British and French soldiers contracted this then-incurable disease while fighting in Egypt between and , and it spread rapidly upon their return to Europe because of crowding and lack of sanitation in their barracks. Far more blinded veterans were compelled to struggle for existence in cities and villages with or without the help of their families.
Barbier must have concluded that, if his system of night-writing could not help the army in the field, perhaps it could help civilians. Training large numbers of people in its use, however, would require a school-like setting to facilitate instruction and encourage regular practice. For that reason he turned, in , to the Royal Institute for Blind Youths in Paris, the first school of its kind for blind children in the world. By this time, Barbier had perfected his system: no longer using a pocket knife to cut rough markings into paper as he had first done in the field, he now employed the blunt-tip of a stylus to punch out regular dots and later, with the help of a machinist, designed a metal guide-plate to make printing easier.
Until that time, the only system employed to teach blind young people to read was one developed by Valentin Hauy , the founder of the Royal Institute. Because of the large size of the letters, the books that contained the pages were cumbersome and heavy and could only hold a limited number of words. Nor could students reproduce the letters themselves if they wanted to write. Because the grid was purely phonetic, it omitted a letters and thus prevented the precise spelling of words.
It also lacked punctuation, or symbols that could represent mathematical or musical notation.
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