Braille Literacy Month: The Revolution That Changed How The Visually Impaired Read
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Harshita Bisht
In order to honour Louis Braille and raise awareness about lesser-known causes like literacy for the blind, the January month of each year is celebrated as National Braille Literacy Month.
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Homegrown
“Access to communication in the widest sense is access to knowledge, and that is vitally important for us if we are not to go on being despised or patronized by condescending sighted people. We do not need pity, nor do we need to be reminded we are vulnerable. We must be treated as equals – and communication is the way this can be brought about.”

Braille is a system of raised dots on a piece of paper arranged in a manner that every different combination defines an alphabet and even punctuation. Three dots vertically and three horizontally are used in different shapes to give a total of 63 combinations in order to enable visually impaired people to read.

Braille was invented by Louis Braille after he lost his eyesight in a tragic accident. His brilliance, determination, and courage made him develop a writing and reading system that went on to take over the entire world. Braille’s creation was largely completed by 1824 when he was fifteen years old and published his system in 1829.

Braille’s smaller cells were capable of being recognized as letters with a single touch of a finger. The system was soon extended to include Braille musical notation. In 1829, he published Method of Writing Words, Music, and Plain Songs by Means of Dots, for Use by the Blind and Arranged for Them, the first book about his system.

An important point to consider is that Braille in itself is not a language. In fact, almost every language has a Braille system of its own. This is why, learning Braille is, in fact, equivalent to learning to read and write in different languages. Audio-based technology, while very convenient, does not take punctuation and other literary-grammatical devices into account. That’s only one of the instances of how it draws the difference between being simply educated and being literate as well as educated.