14 DAY TRIAL // Reading and writing is the base of learning.
Without these abilities, a lot of knowledge will be hidden from you. Till the XIXth century, blind people were deprived of this possibility.
The situation was changed by a Frenchman, Louis Braille. At the age of three, he accidentally put an awl into one of his eyes. Not only his eye could not be saved, but the infection extended quickly to the other eye, and the little child was left blind.
In 1819, Louis, which even if blind, was an excellent student, registered to the Royal Institute for Young Blind People. The founder of the Institute, Valentin Hauy, had already a program aimed to help blind people. He created a system of embossing large letters on thick paper.
The seeds of his efforts were to be seen later. Braile used Hauy's books, but he realized that the method was toilsome and unpractical and the letters were made for the eye, not for the fingers.
In 1821, when Braille was 12, Charles Barbier, a retired artillery captain, visited the institute. Here, he presented a way of communication named "nocturnal writing" (sonography), invented for the battlefield. It was a tactile communication employing relief points arranged in rectangular shape (six points on vertical and two points on the horizontal). Braille enjoyed the new method and even improved it. In the next two years, Braille simplified this code, elaborated a clear and fitted method, based on a lodge of six points.
In 1829, he made his method public. In 1954, two years after the death of Braille, the system was adapted internationally. Except for some minor modifications, his system is unchanged till today.
In Braille, the reading is made from the left to the right, using one or both hands. There are 63 possible points combinations on the lodges of Braille alphabet. For each letter and punctuation marks in the majority of the alphabets there is a unique combination in Braille.
In some languages, there are shortened Braille versions, in which some lodges represents letter combinations or even whole words which appear frequently. Some are so trained in Braille that they can read 200 words per minute.
For the Latin alphabet adapted to English, Braille alphabet employs only the points on the two upper rows in the case of the first ten letters (from a to j); for the next ten letters (k to t) is added the left point from the lower row; and for the last five letters both points from the low row are added (u to z). W is an exception, employing just the left lower point.