Louis and his classmates would no longer have to learn through the slow process of tracing huge raised print letters and numbers. The braille system was presented to Louis’ peers for the first time in 1824. He had now completed the braille system, a tactile reading and writing system of 64 symbols total. From then on, Louis spent every waking moment outside of class poking holes in paper, ironically, with an awl like the one that accidentally blinded him. His system only had six dots (three dots lined up vertically next to each other) and he assigned different combinations of dots to different letters and punctuation marks. Louis Braille thought that the tactile coding system was a great idea and could be the basis for a form of reading and writing that might be useful for the blind.įrom age 12-15, Louis carefully studied Officer Barbier’s system and developed a simpler system using only a six-dot code so that the blind could use a single index finger to feel and read.

His system was comprised of different combinations of 12 raised dots to represent different symbols. While there, students were visited by French Army Officer Charles Barbier who introduced the students to a 12-dot cryptography system he created for soldiers to use for night-time battlefield communication. He was a determined student and at the age of 10 received a scholarship to attend the National Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, France. Louis’ parents wanted him to obtain an education and enrolled their son at the village’s school where Louis learned by listening. Both eyes became infected resulting in complete blindness by the age of 5. Louis grabbed an awl from the workshop, started playing with it and accidentally injured one of his eyes with it.

His story began at the age of 3 when Louis’ parents Monique and Simon-Rene Braille were making harnesses and saddles one day in their workshop. Louis Braille was born on Januin Coupvray, France. The system is called braille and it consists of raised dot codes that are used worldwide to read and write until this day. Louis Braille was a French Educator who invented a tactile system of reading and writing for the blind and visually impaired in 1824. The Story of Louis Braille: Inventor of the Braille Code

Six dots a story of young louis braille