Dick Barbor-Might: Gift of Braille still as precious after 200 years

Published on Monday 25 May 2009 19:40

THE key is courage, to persist in the face of every kind of difficulty. That quality stands out in the story of Louis Braille, who gave his name to the system of embossed dots that enables blind people to read just as well as the rest of us, but with their fingertips.

And 200 years on from Braille's birth in 1809, the system has stood the test of time. In essence is it the same now as when he invented it while a pupil at a school for the blind, the Institut National des Jeunes Aveugles in Paris.

In modern-day Edinburgh there are a few institutions committed to the use of Braille, notably the Braille Press, Royal Blind and the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB). RNIB Scotland's director John Legg has no doubt about the scale of Braille's achievement. He says: "Like many blind people, Louis Braille had incredible perseverance. He had a world-class idea. Two centuries on people are using the same tools that he invented and that have been adapted for diagrams, mathematical symbols, maps and much else besides."

Lord Colin Low, chairman of the RNIB, is blind and a skilled Braille user. "The French nation can take justifiable pride in having as a son someone who has – and continues – to bestow so much benefit on a section of the community that would otherwise have likely remained in the shadows completely," he says.

The vital moment came in 1821 when Louis was 12, and an army officer called on the director of what at that time was the only blind school in the world. Captain Charles Barbier wanted to make available to blind children his invention of night writing, or sonography, which used a system of raised dots pricked out on a piece of cardboard.

A few days later director Dr Andr Pignier, explained Barbier's system to the assembled teachers and pupils, Louis Braille among them. The military application of sonography was already established, used to send orders at night, soundlessly and without showing a light.

As Louis felt the dots under his finger tips he realised it was a system that, in its simplicity, could provide the solution he sought. Having lost his sight at the age of five he was thirsty for knowledge. In a school with only 14 books, giant tomes with raised conventional print, he believed blind people should be able not merely to communicate simple messages but to be fully literate.

Barbier's system was phonetic, transcribing words into sounds. That worked well enough with simple military orders such as "advance", but was hopeless for the complexities of language and literature.

The challenge for Louis was how to devise a system based, not upon phonetics, but upon the alphabet.

By 1825, still only 16, Louis had created his system, with between one and six dots arranged in two columns within a single cell. There were 63 variations covering letters, punctuation, numbers, certain common words and abbreviations that constituted a limited kind of shorthand. Thus he created not a new language, but a code allowing its users to access the enormous resources of a language.

Lord Low points out Louis was not only a fine scholar but also musical. "He was a keen musician, playing the organ as well as teaching piano and cello and this is reflected in the fact that the Braille system was adapted for music notation from its earliest days."

Marie Graham understands the virtues of Braille music notation better than most. Fully sighted, she learned to use Braille when teaching visually impaired children more than 25 years ago. At that time, blind children attended special schools, but these days most are taught in mainstream education. She explains that a blind child learning to play the piano uses the right hand to follow the left-hand Braille score while playing with the left hand, and reverses the process when learning the right-hand score. "The children will sing each score in turn to hear how it sounds before integrating the left and the right-hand," she says.

The importance of Braille is now accepted, but it was not always thus, and Louis suffered humiliating setbacks. For a long time the existence of alternatives and the associated petty rivalries bedevilled Braille's adoption, yet its supporters eventually won out. One of these was Dr Thomas Rhodes Armitage, who founded a society that eventually became the RNIB. It started life as the British and Foreign Blind Society for Improving Embossed Literature for the Blind. The pick and hammer used by Dr Armitage to produce embossed sheets was superseded by a succession of constantly-improving machines and techniques. In this computer age, most Braille is now produced electronically.

Ms Graham says computer-based technologies do not displace, but rather enhance Braille, allowing for the simultaneous production of texts in conventional print, large print, audio or Braille. "To take another example, a speaker or a singer can use a 'Braillenote' slung across the shoulders, a line of raised dots constantly forming and reforming under the finger tips," she says.

Lord Low believes, when it comes to technology, it is horses for courses. He explains he is happy to use audio for leisure reading, but there are things he cannot do without Braille: "Anything that requires close study – reading a legal document, translating a passage from a foreign language or reading a bedtime story to your kids."

Braille remains a liberating force, as it has been ever since the 12-year-old Louis Braille set himself to improve Charles Barbier's invention of night writing.

Lord Low recalls the words of another 12-year-old, Serbian Milan Djuric, who at that age was blinded by a bomb: "Braille is a day at night, the sun in darkness, a joy at sadness, and a fortune in an accident to the blind."