unlocked the door to education for millions of blind men and women throughout the world when he invented his simple ‘touch’ alphabet of raised dots. The son of a French saddler, Braille was born near Paris in 1809 and lost his sight at the age of three. In his day the lot of the blind was almost as tragic and hopeless as it had always been in the past. One mark of progress, however, had been the opening of the world’s first school for blind children in Paris in 1784. Braille went there as a pupil and eventually became a teacher (he also became one of the best organists in Paris). At the school a system of embossed letters was used to teach the children to read. Then came the revolutionary idea of a French army officer, Charles Barbier de la Serre, to represent letters by raised dots. But Barbier’s system was complicated (it was a code and had to be deciphered and it occupied too much space). So Braille reduced this system of twelve dot squares to six dots which could be felt by the finger tip at one go, and he dropped the cipher, working out various combinations of dots to form the alphabet. When Braille died in 1852 he had no idea that his system would be universally adopted by blind people, and he even had difficulty in getting the method accepted as the official medium of instruction in his own school. Yet today, without the Braille system, the world’s seven million sightless would undoubtedly be deprived of the most powerful key to human freedom and scholarship ever devised for the blind.

The UNESCO Courier, March 1958.