historyWikipedia1820s · Paris, France
Braille was adapted from a soldiers' night-writing code by a teenage student
Louis Braille built his system on night writing, a code of raised dots that Charles Barbier designed so soldiers could read in the dark without light. Barbier's cells had 12 dots and encoded sounds rather than letters, which made them hard to read by touch. Braille switched to six-dot cells and assigned a fixed pattern to each letter, plus symbols for numbers and punctuation. The system was first a one-to-one version of the French alphabet, then grew abbreviations and shorthand-like contractions. Its letter order follows the French alphabet, which is why most braille alphabets still share the same sequence. Efforts to standardise English braille began in 1991 and produced Unified English Braille.
Each braille letter is a cell of up to six raised dots in a two-by-three grid. Readers feel the pattern with their fingertips, so a cell with fewer dots is quicker to read, which is why the most common letters were given simple patterns in some systems.
Braille is the reason blind readers can take in text quickly and precisely, and its design was refined into the modern standard. The contracted forms are a reminder that a good writing system is judged by how fast people can read it.
Louis Braille lost his sight in childhood after an accident in his father's workshop.
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