Braille System History

 Blind reading system before Louis Braille

In the seventeenth century, the Italian Jesuit Francesco Lana invented various writing systems devised for the blind people. He devised a method of relief printing on thick paper and a " system to transcribe efficiently just by drawing lines and making points."

       Hauy Valentine was one of the first French who have been interested in the communication problems faced by blind or visually impaired people. Born into a wealthy family in Picardy in 1745, he studied languages ​​at the University of Paris So he quickly found an answer to this question by developing a system to read and write as many sentences and mathematical operations. He began by getting permission to found a school for blind children. His reading and writing consisted of two columns, each one had six points. Thus, the vowels were identified by the presence of a point in the left column while the number of points in the right column permitted to identify the sound.

Hauy Valentine Museum

 Later, Charles Barbier de la Serre, an ex-artillery officer who was fascinated with this investigation that were, for him, a means of communication that could allow soldiers to read and write in the dark without being seen by the enemy; but his system applied to the battle was unsuccessful. So He decided to adapt it for the blind people. The system which he called sonography is based on relief printing of 2 points according to their associations. The system transcribed 36 different sounds. Despite the complexity and deficiencies of this system, the results were conclusive: the reproduction was greatly improved.

History after Louis Braille

 In 1821 Barbier visited Hauy’s School for the Blind Children?. Then the School of Hauy became the Blind’s Royal Institute. There, Barber met Louis Braille. Braille identified two major defects of the code: first, by representing only sounds, the code was unable to render the orthography of the words; second, the human finger could not encompass the whole 12-dot symbol without moving, and so could not move rapidly from one symbol to another. Braille's solution was to use 6-dot cells and to assign a specific pattern to each letter of the alphabet. At first, braille was a one-to-one transliteration of French orthography, but soon various abbreviations, contractions, and even logograms were developed, creating a system much more like shorthand. For the blind today, braille is an independent writing system rather than a code of printed orthography.

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