Braille Printing

Invented by : Louis Braille

Invented in year : 1825

The Braille system is a system of raised dots that is read with the fingers and is widely used by blind people to read and write. Braille has historically been embossed on paper. The system was invented by Louis Braille of France in the early 1800s. Braille is considered as the world's first binary encoding scheme for representing the characters of a writing system. The system as originally invented by Braille consists of two parts:

1. A character encoding for mapping characters of the French language to tuples of six bits or dots.
2. A way of representing six-bit characters as raised dots in a Braille cell.

Braille System generally consists of cells of six raised dots arranged in a grid of two dots horizontally by three dots vertically. The dots are conventionally numbered 1, 2, and 3 from the top of the left column and 4, 5, and 6 from the top of the right column. The presence or absence of dots gives the coding for the symbol. Dot height is approximately 0.02 inches (0.5 mm); the horizontal and vertical spacing between dot centres within a Braille cell is approximately 0.1 inches (2.5 mm); the blank space between dots on adjacent cells is approximately 0.15 inches (4 mm) horizontally and 0.2 inches (5.0 mm) vertically. A standard Braille page is 11 inches by 11.5 inches and typically has a maximum of 40 to 43 Braille cells per line and 25 lines.

History of the Invention

Louis Braille a son of local harness maker in France, injured his eye on a sharp tool at the age of three. Life as a blind was tough but Louis learned to adapt and learned to lead an otherwise normal life. Because of his superior learning abilities he was allowed to sit in the classroom to learn what he could by listening. Despite an initial assumption that his handicap would keep him well back of the other pupils, he was soon leading the class. At the young age of ten, Louis earned a scholarship to the National Institute for the Blind in Paris, one of the first of its kind in the world. There too, most instruction was oral, although there were some books in a raised-print system developed by the school's founder, Valentin Haüy. But the system had it's share of faults, the raised letters were made using paper pressed against copper wire so the students never learned to write. Another disadvantage was that the letters weighed a lot and whenever people published books using this system, they put together a book with multiple stories in one in order to save money. This made the books sometimes weigh over a hundred pounds. The school had just 14 books, all of which Louis had read. But the diligent Louis did well at his studies, and moreover developed a considerable talent for music, first at the piano and then at the organ. The general idea of a tactile alphabet that would allow blind persons to read and write also began to take shape in his mind at this time.

The Braille system was based on a method of communication originally developed by French army captain, Charles Barbier in response to Napoleon's demand for a code that soldiers could use to communicate silently and without light at night called night writing. Barbier's system was too complex for soldiers to learn, and was rejected by the military. In 1821, Barbier later adapted the system and presented it to the Institution for Blind Youth, hoping that it would be officially adopted there. He called the system Sonography, because it represented words according to sound rather than spelling. While the Institution accepted Sonography only tentatively, Louis set about using and studying it with his customary intensity. And soon he discovered both the potential of the basic idea and the shortcomings in some of Barbier's specific provisions, such as a clumsy 12-dot cell and the phonetic basis. In 1825 by age 15, Louis had developed the system that we know today as Braille , employing a 6-dot cell and based upon normal spelling. He also went on to lay the foundations of the Braille representation of music and in 1829 published the Method of Writing Words, Music and Plain Song by Means of Dots, for Use by the Blind and Arranged by Them.

Development in the Invention of Braille Printing

In 1951, David Abraham, a woodworking teacher at Perkins, created a portable Braille terminal. Perkins Brailler revolutionized communication for the blind. It paved the way for various development and inventions which made Braille even more easier than before. Some of the Developments include -

Refreshable Braille Display or Braille Terminal - It is an electro-mechanical device for displaying Braille characters, usually by means of raising dots through holes in a flat surface. Blind computer users, who cannot use a normal computer monitor, use it to read text output. Speech synthesizers are also commonly used for the same task, and a blind user may switch between the two systems or use both at the same time depending on circumstances.

Braille Embosser - It is a printer, necessarily an impact printer, that renders text as Braille. Using special translation software, a print document can be embossed with relative ease, making Braille production much more efficient and cost-effective. The first embosser for regular Braille pages was the BrailleEmboss, which was built at MIT in the late 1960's

Braille Notetakers - It is a electronic portable note-taking devices that allow keyboard entry in Braille using the 6-key layout of the Perkins Brailler and output in synthesized speech and/or a one or two-line refreshable Braille display consisting of tiny pins made of metal and plastic. Notetakers include PDA features such as an address book and calculator.

Softwares - These include -

1. Jaws (screen reader) - It is a program that reads the words on the screen and enables the browsing of folders, documents and programs on Microsoft Windows. Words on the screen can also be sent to a Braille display.
2. Kurzweil - It allows scanning of texts into the computer and narrates it.
3. Goodfeel - It is a Braille Music Translator made by Dancing Dots that helps blind musicians and students.

Role of Invention of Braille Printing in the Improvement of Human Life

• Braille Reading Proficiency provided an essential skill set that allowed visually impaired children not only to compete with their sighted peers in a school environment, but also later in life as they enter the workforce

• Advances in Braille Technology enabled blind or visually impaired people to do common tasks such as writing, browsing the internet, typing in Braille and printing in text, engaging in chat, downloading files, music, using electronic mail, burning music and reading documents.

• It also allow blind or visually impaired students to complete all assignments in school as the rest of sighted classmates and allows them take courses on-line.