What is Braille?

Named after its creator, Braille is a system of making raised dots on paper to form letters and words that are read by the blind with their fingertips. If you are sighted, look at this Braille generator to see how it works. At its simplest it's basically a letter by letter substitution.

If you are a sighted person looking at the graphic at the top of this artilce, you can see that there are six possible places for dots arranged in a cell. Each Braille letter, word, punctuation mark, or number can be made using different combinations of these dots. Two of the dots would be bumped up on a piece of paper, much the same that you could emboss a letter on a piece of tape using a label maker, to form the letter E or the letter I (eye). You can feel those bumps with your finger tips and tell what the letters are. This method of writing Braille compares to writing print with a pen or pencil.

This system of writing and reading was invented 200 years ago by a boy named Louis Braille. He became blind through an accident, and he discovered that trying to read raised print-style letters was much too slow. He wanted a faster way for blind people to read and write.

A French army captain, Charles Barbier, originally created a code of raised dots and dashes as a way to allow soldiers to write and read messages at night without using a light that might give away their positions. He later adapted the system and presented it to the Institution for Blind Youth, hoping that it would be officially adopted there. It was based on phonetics and consisted of groups of dots arranged in two columns of six dots each.

Louis Braille worked with this idea to develop his own simplified system that we know today as Braille. He based the code on the normal alphabet and reduced the number of dots by half, giving over 60 usable combinations of dots. Some modifications have been made to it over the years but the Braille code in use today is virtually the same as it was in 1834.

It takes some practice to become a good reader of Braille, just as it does with print, but it is almost always worth the effort. We learn Braille by feeling the different dots in each Braille cell and memorizing what the different combinations of dots stand for. Even if someone can still read some print, it is best to learn Braille when you are young just exactly for the same reasons that it's best to learn the print alphabet when young. For a child, learning to read is learning to read, whether it is done in print or in Braille, and blind children master reading and writing in Braille in the same time that sighted children master print. Blind adults can learn Braille through many different types of programs or classes. Learning to read and write Braille can be done in six months or less. Good Braille readers, like good print readers, can read at hundreds of words a minute, much faster than they can talk.

Today blind people use Braille to take notes in school, to write letters, to read magazines, to keep addresses and phone numbers, to keep recipe files, to write books, and to do the other things you would do using print. Talking Books can get you many magazines in Braille as well as in a recorded form, and there are many sources that you can go to for magazines independently of the library system.

So, "big deal, right? There is a misconception that print is normal and Braille is inferior, so many blind people are taught to believe that it is better to read print at all costs and that Braille is a last resort. The question is really one of "Why bother? Computers can handle all this stuff these days." But there is far more to it than that. Read our Braille Literacy page to discover why these little bumps really are a big deal. Read it now before you read anything else here. It is very important.

Braille works extremely well on playing cards and many popular board games. The biggest accommodation sighted people have to make when playing cards is to announce any card that goes down in a way that would be visible and pertinent to another sighted player. A piece of Brailled tape on top of a tile lets you play Scrabble again! It is very easy to learn that basic level of Braille. Check our Gadgets & Gizmos for many more Braille gadgets. Gizmos too!