What is Braille?
Braille is a system of six raised dots created in 1821 by French schoolboy Louis Braille. It is an essential tool with which children with profound or total loss of sight can learn to read and write.
While tape recorders and talking computers are handy and important sources of information for blind people, only braille allows for complete command of written language.
Braille and Literacy
In recent studies, blind people who learn braille at an early age have generally been found to complete more years of school, have higher incomes and employment rates, and read more in adulthood than do blind people who do not learn braille in childhood.
Several factors, including advances in medical care for premature infants, have caused the number of legally blind children in the United States to increase, rising from 43,000 in 1987 to more than 56,900 in 2004.
In 2004 there were 1,932 braille-dominant students in grades K-6 nationwide.
Most blind children -- 85% -- attend public schools. About 9 percent are in private residential schools for the blind, 3 percent are in programs for the multi-handicapped, and 3 percent are in rehabilitation programs.
Who is Louis Braille?
www.nbp.org
Louis Braille is the inventor of the braille code. He was born on January 4, 1809, in Coupvray, France. At the age of 3, while playing in his father's shop, Louis injured his eye on a sharp tool. Despite the best care available at the time, infection set in and soon spread to the other eye, leaving him completely blind.
Barely 16, Braille, then a student at the National Institute for Blind Youth in Paris in 1825, spent every waking moment outside class poking holes in paper, trying to come up with a more efficient way to represent print letters and numbers tactually. Until then, he and his fellow blind students read by tracing raised print letters with their fingers. It was painfully slow and few blind students mastered the technique. Writing required memorization of the shapes of letters and then an attempt to reproduce them on paper, without being able to see or read the results.
Louis got his inspiration to use embossed dots to represent letters after he watched Charles Barbier, a retired artillery officer in Napoleon's army, demonstrate a note-taking system he invented of embossed dots to represent sounds (most of the soldiers were illiterate) that would allow notes to be passed among the ranks without striking a light, which might alert the enemy to their position. The army was not impressed, so Barbier brought his system to the school for the blind. Louis immediately recognized its merits and spent the next three years improving upon Barbier's idea.
By 1824, Louis had in place the code that bears his name and is used today in almost every country in the world, adapted to almost every known language from Albanian to Zulu. Louis Braille died on January 6, 1852 at the age of 43, having lived a successful life as teacher, musician, researcher, and inventor. In 2009, the world celebrated Braille's Bicentennial.
Deciphering Braille
People often think that braille is a language. Actually there is a braille code for every
foreign language you can imagine including French, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, and Hebrew. There are also braille codes for
mathematics,
music, and computers.
The Braille Cell
The braille characters make up the letters of the alphabet, punctuation marks, numbers, and everything else you can write in print.
The letter "a" is written with only dot 1.
The letter "d" has dots 1, 4, and 5.
The letter "y" has dots 1, 3, 4, 5, and 6.
When all six dots are used, the character is called a "full cell."
And when no dots are used it's an "empty cell!"
The picture below shows you how the dots are arranged in the braille cell for each letter of the alphabet. Do you see a pattern between the lines of the alphabet? Why do you think the "w" is not part of the pattern? Click here to
find out if you're right.
Capitalizing in Braille
Braille does not have a separate alphabet of capital letters as there is in print. Capital letters are indicated by placing a dot 6 in front of the letter to be capitalized. Two capital signs mean the whole word is capitalized.
N
B
A
Braille Punctuation
A "period" is written with dots 2, 5, and 6. (Do you see how it is the same shape as the letter "d," only lower in the cell?) There are other characters for each mark of punctuation such as dots 2, 3, and 5 for an exclamation point. (Do you see that it is the same shape as the letter "f," only lower in the cell? Like the previous example, which is called a "dropped d," this is called a "dropped f").
Braille Numbers
Braille numbers are made using the first ten letters of the alphabet, "a" through "j", and a special number sign, dots 3, 4, 5, and 6.
#
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
0
Larger numbers only need one number sign. The comma in braille is dot 2, and is used in numbers and with words, too.
3
1
,
9
8
7
The braille code is used for words and for numbers in sentences or page numbers, but when students take math class they learn a different code called the Nemeth code.
Expanding the Code
Now that you understand how dots are arranged in the braille cell to make the letters of the alphabet and numbers, you're ready to learn more about the code. Braille uses special characters called contractions to make words shorter. We use contractions like "don't" as a short way of writing two words, such as "do" and "not." In braille there are many additional contractions, 189 in all! Using these contractions saves space, which is very important because braille books are much larger and longer than print books.
Some contractions stand for a whole word. For example, when the full cell is used as a contraction, it means "for." Dots 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6 make up the word "and" and dots 2, 3, 4, and 6 make up the word "the."
for =
and =
the =
Other contractions stand for a group of letters within a word. In the example below, you see the contraction "ing" (dots 3, 4, 6) in the word "sing" and as an ending in the word "playing." Likewise, you see the contraction "ed" (dots 1, 2, 4, 6) in the word "edge" and as an ending in the word "played."
ing
s
ing
p
l
a
y
ing
ed
ed
g
e
p
l
a
y
ed
