Named after Louis Braille, blinded at age three, who developed his raised-dot system at 15 by adapting a military night-writing code.
A system of writing for the blind in which characters are represented by patterns of raised dots felt with the fingertips.
Named after Louis Braille (1809–1852), who lost his sight at age three after an accident with an awl in his father's leather workshop in Coupvray, near Paris. At ten, he entered the Royal Institute for Blind Youth (Institut Royal des Jeunes Aveugles), where he encountered 'night writing' ('écriture nocturne'), a system of raised dots invented by Captain Charles Barbier de la Serre for soldiers to read battlefield messages in darkness without light. Braille simplified Barbier's twelve-dot cell to a six-dot cell,
Louis Braille developed his system at age 15, but it was not officially adopted by the institute where he both studied and taught until two years after his death in 1852. The school's director had actively resisted the system during Braille's lifetime, preferring embossed Roman letters.