Bicentenary of Louis Braille, the man who invented the Braille language
“We, the blind, are as indebted to Louis Braille as mankind is to Gutenberg”. Hellen Keller
Louis Braille was born in 1809 and was French. His parents were poor and his father worked as the village saddler. One day, he was playing into his father’s workshop with a tool. The tool slipped and pierced his eye, which was damaged forever. Some time later, his second eye was also damaged, due to the infection of the first. This is how he lost his sight at four years old.
In spite of his useless eyes he was very intelligent and succeeded at school. Thanks to his school results, the local landowner offered to send him to one of the first schools for blinds. This is how, at the age of 10 he left his family to attend the Royal Institution for Blind Youth.
Life at this school was hard but it gave to Louis the idea of finding a suitable code which could be used by blind people. He worked hard to adapt a code used in Napoleon’s army, which consisted in using raised dots and dashes rather than actual letters. It took him several years to develop his own version of the code, using 6 dots only to represent the standard alphabet.
All his life was devoted to teach this system to as many blind people as possible, he then became a teacher of the Royal Institution for Blind Youth.
He died at the age of 43, and 2 years later, the “Braille” system was adopted as the official communication system for blind people in France.
He was seen as a hero by blind people.
However, Braille encountered resistance in that it was very difficult for sighted people to read it. In 1870, a group of blind British people decided that Braille would be used by blind people in the UK. This group is now known as the RNIB (Royal National Institute for the Blind).
In other words, Louis Braille offered blind people the gift of independence and joy of reading to thousands of people around the world.
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