Tehnička škola Šibenik

Today is World Braille Day, celebrated since 2019. Its purpose is to raise awareness of the importance of Braille as a means of communication in the full realization of the human rights for blind and partially sighted people. 

Source: United Nations

Danas obilježavamo Svjetski dan Louis Brailla, tvorca brajice - pisma za slijepe i slabovidne osobe. Svrha obilježavanja ovog dana je podizanje svijesti o brajici kao sredstvu komunikacije slijepih i slabovidnih osoba.

If you are interested in Louis Braille and would like to do an interesting vocabulary task, read the attached text file.

For a long time, blind people were excluded from the world of books and education. Touched by the hardship he witnessed among poor blind people in 13^th century Paris, king Louis IX of France built a fraternal residence for the blind.

Later in the 18th century, Valentine Haüy recognized people being treated wrong and wanted to change the perception of the blind in public. As legend has it, he gave a coin to a young blind beggar. By the embossed faces of the coin, the boy realized it was more than the usual few sous. He called out the denomination of the coin at which point Haüy grasped the boy could decipher the value of coins by touch. In 1785 Haüy founded the first school for the blind and 17-year-old beggar became his first student. The school would later be attended by a certain Louis Braille.

Louis Braille was born on January 4, 1809 into poor but close-knit family. The precocious toddler liked spending time with his father in his workshop. At the time Napoleon invaded Russia. People were concerned and afraid of towns being ravaged. On the fateful day, when Louis was just 3 years old, his father left the workshop unattended to gather more information about Napoleon retreating from Russia. While no one was watching the inquisitive boy took an awl and tried to make a hole in a piece of leather. While pressing down to drive the point in, the tool slipped and struck him in one eye. Unfortunately, an infection set in and soon spread to the other eye. The Brailles were recommended to a renowned doctor in Paris, but unfortunately nothing could be done. Louis’ sight gradually deteriorated and by the age of 5 he was completely blind.

The tragic event and the subsequent loss of his sight did not hinder Louis’ remarkable progress. Despite his disability Louis attended the village school but he had to leave it when the curriculum required reading and writing skills. Aged 10, Braille got a scholarship to the Royal Institution for Blind Youth in Paris. The building was a dilapidated building whose damp rooms smelled of mildew, food was scarce and very often children were served only bread and water.  In 1821, a former artillery officer Charles Barbier visited the school. Years earlier, upon Napoleon’s demand he had invented a code of 12 raised dots and dashes for silent communication without using a light at night. The system was purely phonetic, in other words based on spoken sounds. Although impressed with Barbier’s system, he had suggestions to improve it.

Barbier’s system was too complicated and each page could accomodate only one or two sentences. The cells were bigger than what the fingertips could cover. There was no way to identify punctuation marks, numbers or musical signs and there were horizontal dashes along the dots. Louis worked painstakingly on finding a way to improve Barbier’s system. Two years later he finally created his six-dot system in varying patterns of domino-like cells, providing a total of 64 permutations. The 64^th permutation with no dots is known as ‘space'. Each letter was represented by a certain combination of dots which he could feel with his fingertip all at once. Also, he decided on the letters of the alphabet instead of sounds. Braille is not a language, it’s a system of writing which means it can be adapted to different languages. Braille loved music so he invented a system for writing music, too.

The teachers were reluctant to accept the new code. As a result, the task of educating the masses of the blind stayed at a standstill.  He succumbed to tuberculosis aged 43 two years before his system was finally taught at the institute where he’d been a student.

He was buried at Coupvray, but in 1952, on the centenary of his death his remains were disinterred at Coupvray and taken to Paris to be deposited with honour in the Pantheon. The bones of Braille’s hands, however, were separated and kept in a concrete box on top of his empty tomb. Though his name would forever be linked to the tactile writing system for the blind, throughout his life he would always express his indebtedness to the ‘night-writer’.