On January 4, 1809, is born in Coupvray, France. He would go on to develop the writing system for visually impaired readers that bears his name: braille.
Braille in an accident at age three. As a student at the National Institute for Blind Children in Paris, Braille discovered a system called 鈥渘ight writing鈥 that a man named Charles Barbier had invented based on his experience in the French army.
Barbier developed night writing as a way for soldiers to pass messages at night without needing a light to read them. The writing system used raised dots that soldiers could feel with their fingers. Each 12-dot cell represented a letter or phonetic sound. However, because readers could not read a whole cell with one finger, it was difficult for readers to decipher the messages efficiently.
Braille to create his own writing system. Braille鈥檚 system used 6-dot cells, and because these cells were smaller, readers could decipher each cell with only one finger. This made it easier for the reader to move quickly from one cell to the next.
It wasn鈥檛 until after Braille鈥檚 death, in 1852, that schools, governments and other institutions his writing system. In 1878, the World Congress for the Blind voted to make braille the internationally recognized writing system for visually impaired people. Because braille is a system of codes and not a language itself, readers can adapt it to represent any language. Today, braille codes exist for at least .
