World Braille Day

Today we honor the dots that make up a language of their own.

World Braille Day is celebrated on the birthday of Louis Braille.
Happy birthday, mister Braille!

Louis Braille was born in France on January 4th, 1809 with a tendency for curiosity and a passion for learning from a young age.
At the early age of 3 years old, this curiosity led to him playing with sharp tools in his father’s harness making shop.
Louis accidentally struck himself in the eye with a stitching awl (a sharp tool used for making holes in leather).
He lost his vision in that eye but it eventually spread to both eyes and left him blind by the age of five.
Thanks to his passion for learning, Braille still excelled in his education despite his disability and was eventually awarded a scholarship to France’s Royal Institute for Blind Youth. 

At the time, there weren’t many resources available for the blind, so when Braille was 15 years old, he decided to take matters into his own hands and invent a reading and writing system specifically designed for the visually impaired.
Louis studied the methods of Charles Barbier, who had developed a system of raised dots and dashes called “night writing” that could be used to communicate in the dark.
This system was hard to learn, hard to read and took up a lot of space on surfaces. But it laid the foundation that Louis Braille would happily improve upon.
Building upon this structure of night writing Braille created a script that was more compact, more flexible and much easier to read in a way that was previously impossible.
He presented his work to his peers for the first time in 1824.
The Braille system was revolutionary and it allowed visually-impaired people to access the same information that was available to sighted people.
Louis devoted his life to teaching and promoting Braille and his work is still used today.
It is a testament to his commitment and determination that the system is named after him.

After finishing his education, Braille became a professor at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth and continued to work on refining and advancing his system.
Although his invention was not widely recognized during his lifetime, braille has since become a revolutionary invention used by people all over the world.
Louis Braille passed away on January 6th, 1852, but his legacy lives on as one of the greatest educators of all time.