Let’s Celebrate…World Braille Day
What Is the Significance of World Braille Day?
World Braille Day celebrates the importance of Braille as a medium of communication for people who are blind and visually impaired. The day aims to promote awareness of the braille language, which strives to bridge the big divide between ordinary and specially-abled people.
World Braille Day commemorates the birth anniversary of Louis Braille, who is popularly known for inventing a language used by blind and visually impaired people.
Louis Braille was born in the village of Coupvray, France on January 4, 1809. He lost his sight at a very young age after he accidentally stabbed himself in the eye with his father’s awl. Braille’s father was a leather-worker and poked holes in the leather goods he produced with the awl.
At eleven years old, Braille found inspiration to modify Charles Barbier’s (who served in Napoleon Bonaparte’s French army developed a unique system known as “night writing” so soldiers could communicate safely during the night) “night writing” code in an effort to create an efficient written communication system for fellow blind individuals. He enrolled at the National Institute of the Blind in Paris one year earlier. He spent the better part of the next nine years developing and refining the system of raised dots that we now know by his name, Braille.
After all of Braille’s work, the code was now based on cells with only 6-dots instead of 12. This crucial improvement meant that a fingertip could encompass the entire cell unit with one impression and move rapidly from one cell to the next. Over time, the world gradually accepted braille as the fundamental form of written communication for blind individuals. Today it remains basically as he invented it.
However, there have been some small modifications to the braille system, particularly the addition of contractions representing groups of letters or whole words that appear frequently in a language. The use of contractions permits faster braille reading. It also helps reduce the size of braille books, making them much less cumbersome.
Braille passed away in 1853 at the age of 43, a year before his home country of France adopted braille as its’ official communication system for blind individuals. A few years later, in 1860, braille made its way “across the pond” to America where it was adopted by The Missouri School for the Blind in St. Louis.
It was the United Nations which, in its proclamation in 2018, decided to observe the event of World Braille Day on January 4th.
Google Play and the Google Play logo are trademarks of Google LLC.
