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The invention of Braille was a major turning point in the history of disability.
The
writing system of raised dots used by visually impaired people was developed by
Louis Braille in nineteenth-century France. In a society that did not value disabled
people in general, blindness was particularly stigmatized, and lack of access to
reading and writing was a significant barrier to social participation. The idea of
tactile reading was not entirely new, but existing methods based on sighted
systems were difficult to learn and use. As the first writing system designed for blind
people’s needs, Braille was a groundbreaking new accessibility tool. It not only
provided practical benefits, but also helped change the cultural status of blindness.
This essay begins by discussing the situation of blind people in nineteenth-century
Europe. It then describes the invention of Braille and the gradual process of its
acceptance within blind education. Subsequently, it explores the wide-ranging
effects of this invention on blind people’s social and cultural lives.
Lack of access to reading and writing put blind people at a serious disadvantage in
nineteenth-century society. Text was one of the primary methods through which
people engaged with culture, communicated with others, and accessed information;
without a well-developed reading system that did not rely on sight, blind people
were excluded from social participation (Weygand, 2009). While disabled people in
general suffered from discrimination, blindness was widely viewed as the worst
disability, and it was commonly believed that blind people were incapable of
pursuing a profession or improving themselves through culture (Weygand, 2009).
This demonstrates the importance of reading and writing to social status at the
time: without access to text, it was considered impossible to fully participate in
society. Blind people were excluded from the sighted world, but also entirely
dependent on sighted people for information and education.
In France, debates about how to deal with disability led to the adoption of different
strategies over time. While people with temporary difficulties were able to access
public welfare, the most common response to people with long-term disabilities,
such as hearing or vision loss, was to group them together in institutions (Tombs,
1996). At first, a joint institute for the blind and deaf was created, and although the
partnership was motivated more by financial considerations than by the well-being
of the residents, the institute aimed to help people develop skills valuable to society
(Weygand, 2009). Eventually blind institutions were separated from deaf
institutions, and the focus shifted towards education of the blind, as was the case
for the Royal Institute for Blind Youth, which Louis Braille attended (Jimenez et al,
2009). The growing acknowledgement of the uniqueness of different disabilities led
to more targeted education strategies, fostering an environment in which the
benefits of a specifically blind education could be more widely recognized.
Several different systems of tactile reading can be seen as forerunners to the

method Louis Braille developed, but these systems were all developed based on the
sighted system. The Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris taught the students to
read embossed roman letters, a method created by the school’s founder, Valentin
Hauy (Jimenez et al., 2009). Reading this way proved to be a rather arduous task, as
the letters were difficult to distinguish by touch. The embossed letter method was
based on the reading system of sighted people, with minimal adaptation for those
with vision loss. As a result, this method did not gain significant success among
blind students.
Louis Braille was bound to be influenced by his school’s founder, but the most
influential pre-Braille tactile reading system was Charles Barbier’s night writing. A
soldier in Napoleon’s army, Barbier developed a system in 1819 that used 12 dots
with a five line musical staff (Kersten, 1997). His intention was to develop a system
that would allow the military to communicate at night without the need for light
(Herron, 2009). The code developed by Barbier was phonetic (Jimenez et al., 2009);
in other words, the code was designed for sighted people and was based on the
sounds of words, not on an actual alphabet. Barbier discovered that variants of
raised dots within a square were the easiest method of reading by touch (Jimenez et
al., 2009). This system proved effective for the transmission of short messages
between military personnel, but the symbols were too large for the fingertip, greatly
reducing the speed at which a message could be read (Herron, 2009). For this
reason, it was unsuitable for daily use and was not widely adopted in the blind
community.
Nevertheless, Barbier’s military dot system was more efficient than Hauy’s
embossed letters, and it provided the framework within which Louis Braille
developed his method. Barbier’s system, with its dashes and dots, could form over
4000 combinations (Jimenez et al., 2009). Compared to the 26 letters of the Latin
alphabet, this was an absurdly high number. Braille kept the raised dot form, but
developed a more manageable system that would reflect the sighted alphabet. He
replaced Barbier’s dashes and dots with just six dots in a rectangular configuration
(Jimenez et al., 2009). The result was that the blind population in France had a
tactile reading system using dots (like Barbier’s) that was based on the structure of
the sighted alphabet (like Hauy’s); crucially, this system was the first developed
specifically for the purposes of the blind.
While the Braille system gained immediate popularity with the blind students at the
Institute in Paris, it had to gain acceptance among the sighted before its adoption
throughout France. This support was necessary because sighted teachers and
leaders had ultimate control over the propagation of Braille resources. Many of the
teachers at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth resisted learning Braille’s system
because they found the tactile method of reading difficult to learn (Bullock & Galst,
2009). This resistance was symptomatic of the prevalent attitude that the blind
population had to adapt to the sighted world rather than develop their own tools
and methods. Over time, however, with the increasing impetus to make social
contribution possible for all, teachers began to appreciate the usefulness of Braille’s
system (Bullock & Galst, 2009), realizing that access to reading could help improve
the productivity

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The invention of Braille was a major turning point in the history of disability.

Several different systems of tactile reading can be seen as forerunners to the

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