Louis Braille, the man who enabled the visually impaired 'to see'

Today marks the 207th birth anniversary of Lous Braille the French educator who invented Braille a system of reading and writing for use by the blind or visually impairedBraille which is used today on a worldwide scale has enabled visually impaired people to read and write and even use computer screens thanks to the latest refreshable braille display technology On this occasion we look back at how the man chanced upon this amazing inventionLouis BrailleAt the tender age of 3 Louis Braille was accidentally blinded in an accident at his fathers workshop While trying to make holes in a piece of leather with an awl he pressed down hard to drive the point in while squinting closely at the surface only for the awl to glance across the tough leather and strike him in one of his eyesAfter the damaged eye was patched up by a local physician Braille was sent to a highly respected surgeon in Paris but no treatment could save the damaged organ The young Louis Braille suffered in agony for weeks as the wound became severely infected and eventually lost sight in his other eye after the infection spread due to sympathetic opthalmiaDespite this harrowing experience Louis Braille learnt to master his disability while growing up thanks in part to his parents who decided to raise him as a normal child His father hewed special canes for him to navigate the village and Brailles creative mind impressed the local teachers and priests and he was accommodated with higher educationAs a young school boy in 1819 Louis Braille came across the Hauumly system devised by Valentin Hauumly the founder of the Royal Institution for the Young Blind in Paris which is now the National Institute for the Young Blind INJA Hauumly was a committed philanthropist who devoted his life to helping the blindHis system incorporated a technique of embossing heavy paper with the raised imprints of Latin letters Readers would trace their fingers over the text comprehending slowly but in a traditional fashion which Hauumly could appreciateAlthough helpful in making the blind read Lous Braille despaired over their lack of depth the amount of information kept in such books was necessarily small This was due to the letters being made in a complex artisanal process using wet paper pressed against copper wire the children could not hope to write by themselves Louis Braille was able to write his first sentences after SimonReneacute provided him with an alphabet fashioned from bits of thick leather a slow and cumbersome process but effective nonethelessPicture for representational purposesIn 1821 Louis Braille discovered a new system of communication devised by Captain Charles Barbier of the French Army possibly from a newspaper account read to him by a friend according to some sources The system which Barbier referred to as night writing was a code of code of dots and dashes impressed into thick paper These impressions could be interpreted entirely by the fingers letting soldiers share information on the battlefield without having light or needing to speak Although this turned out to be extremely complicated to use in its original military form Louis Braille was inspired to develop a system of his own from itAfter working tirelessly on his ideas Louis Braille finally completed his system in 1824 at only 15 years of age He simplified Charles Barbiers night writing system into uniformed columns for each letter and reduced the twelve raised dots to six Braille published his system in 1829 and by the second edition in 1837 had discarded the dashes because they were too difficult to read Crucially Brailles smaller cells were capable of being recognized as letters with a single touch of a fingerIronically Louis Braille used an awl to create his own raiseddot system of the Braille the same tool which had blinded him He further worked on an ergonomic interface for using it based on Barbiers own slate and stylus tools By soldering two metal strips across the slate he created a secure area for the stylus which would keep the lines straight and readable