January 4th - WORLD BRAILLE DAY

Louis Braille's birthdate: 4 January, 1809

An annual opportunity for blindness organizations to promote litteracy, showcase their work and raise public awareness of blindness issues

Louis Braille became blind at the age of 3, when he accidentally poked himself in the eye with a stitching awl, one of his father's workshop tools. The injury wasn't thought to be serious until it got infected. Braille's other eye went blind because of sympathetic ophthalmia.

At the very young age of 10, Braille earned a scholarship to the National Institute for the Blind in Paris, one of the first of its kind in the world. However, the conditions in the school were not notably better.Braille, a bright and creative student, became a talented cellist and organist in his time at the school, playing the organ for churches all over France.

In 1821, Charles Barbier, a Captain in the French Army, visited the school. Barbier shared his invention called "night writing" a code of 12 raised dots and a number of dashes that let soldiers share top-secret information on the battlefield without having to speak. The code was too difficult for Louis to understand and he later changed the number of raised dots to 6 to form what we today call Braille.

"Louis Braille" in braille

The same year, Louis Braille began inventing his raised-dot system with his father's stitching awl, the same implement with which he had blinded himself, finishing at the age 15. Inspired by the wooden dice his father gave to him, his system used only six dots which corresponded to letters The 6-dot system allowed the recognition of letters with a single fingertip apprehending all the dots at once.These dots consisted of patterns in order to keep the system easy to learn. Braille later extended his system to include notation for mathematics and music. The first book in Braille was published in 1829 under the title Method of Writing Words, Music, and Plain Songs by Means of Dots, for Use by the Blind and Arranged for Them.

Braille became a well-respected teacher at the Institute. Although he was admired and respected by his pupils, his writing system was not taught at the Institute during his lifetime. He died in Paris of tuberculosis in 1852 at the age of 43.

His system was finally officially recognized in France two years after his death, in 1854.