Who Invented Braille?

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In this video:

Braille’s story starts when he was three years old. He was playing in his father’s shop in Coupvray, France, and somehow managed to injure his eye. Though he was offered the best medical attention available at the time, it wasn’t enough—an infection soon developed and spread to his other eye, rendering him blind in both eyes. While a tragedy for him, had this accident not happened, we wouldn’t have braille today.

Sources:

[Séananigans]

„Don’t touch. Danger!“ must be the most scary thing to read in Braille.

[oalfodr]

You should turn up the volume in intro. My hearing is not permanently damaged.

[heyyou]

My Grandmother learned braille during world war one.
She was 10 and wanted to help vets blinded during the war by mustard gas. She parlayed that into a career at the Perkins Institute for the Blind in Watertown Massachusetts where she worked most of her working days.

[dustybragg]

Learned how to read braille when I was in the third grade. Had to do something when my vision got to strained to see large printed words. Glad I did, changed my life.

[jeanbonnefoy]

I've been living for several years on rue Louis Braille in Paris. Every time I had to give my address, I felt very proud; sometimes just for the fact of having the opportunity to introduce this extraordinary guy to those who had never heard about him...

[EveryOhterLetter]

You have just been putting out amazing videos with correct, correct information about blind people. Thank you. I am visually impaired and I appreciate this. You really do your homework.

[mafeuk]

I learned about Braille, oddly enough, from the Pokémon games.

[WildeFyre]

Simon... why is your intro music so incredibly loud?

[tncorgi]

At a municipal airport in St. Pete, Florida, they mounted a Braille sign at the entrance to the pilots' parking lot. I often wondered how much that cost and who forced them to do it.

[AaronLinson]

as a blind person myself, there is also computer, nemeth aka math, music, and many different language braille as well.

[jackcarroll]

thanks it just hit me in the middle of the video that the braille is 6x6 tiles and that makes the 26 letters of the alphabet plus the punctuation, i really did learn somthing today=)

[ZeldaWolf]

Forgot to mention in my last comment, but another thing that was wrong with night writing was that he didn't use letters. It was all about sounds, so someone without prior knowledge of the written word, couldn't learn it from that system. That was another thing Louis tried, and succeeded, in creating, a system of reading and writing that actually use the letters, so blind people can actually learn the Alphabet.

Also, although Braille was created using that letters, it has been adapted to Asian languages, and languages like Hebrew as well. Pretty much any language.

Also, another bonus fact, W wasn't in Louis' alphabet, so he had to add it in later, so the pattern that braille follows doesn't include W. An example of that pattern, is following:

A is the first letter of the alphabet, and it's only dot 1, which is top row on the left. Then, if you add a dot 3 to that, which is third row on the left, you get a K. A K is 10 letters from A. Then, if you take the K, and you add a dot 6, which is the bottom right, you'll get U, and U is 10 letters from K. If you do this with all of the first 10 letters of the alphabet, you'll get the rest, except for W.

I didn't realize this until I was like 20, because I just learned the letters, and wasn't told this pattern, but I thought it was really cool when I figured it out.

[crovax]

I've seen Braille warnings on steam pipes

[monpetitchouxpastry]

Can I just say that I heavily appreciate the fact that the title of the video is a question, and in the first 10 seconds of the video, you answer that question

[ZeldaWolf]

I've always been pissed off that it took Americans until the 20th century to adapt braille. And even once it came to America, it wasn't the official writing system until the 30s I believe, maybe even later. If you Google, "the war of the dots, " and find the article by the American Federation of the Blind, you can learn about it. It has to do with three different systems of writing for the blind, including Braille, that were fighting to be the main writing System for blind people in America. One of them had no punctuation, and the other was way too big to be read with one finger, which is what Braille was created to do! There was only one teacher who saw that his students were using braille and thought, "man of my students like this, maybe I should use it too!" And so he adopted it at his school. It was in large part thanks to Helen Keller that Braille was officially adopted by the US. She wrote a letter discussing how difficult it was having three different systems, and how much Braille was better than the others. It was awesome. 😀. It sucks though that today people think that Braille isn't as needed for blind people. Hello! We need to learn how to spell things correctly, and we want to actually be able to read things too! We also like being able to write down our thoughts without technology, just like sighted people can. Anybody who doubts the usefulness of Braille can bite me! My dots!

[chek]

To continue with the subject of unusual forms of communication, an episode on shorthand like Gregg or Pitman would certainly be entertaining.

[aaronrawley]

As a person who is legally blind. Thank you fir putting this video out. Although I don’t use Braille this gives the general public a glimpse of what learning/reading is like fir blind people
.

[TheGreatMunky]

0:08 Question answered. That was a quick video. Thanks!

[GammaAlloy]

That sound at the start makes me think my speakers have blown.

[jojowiley]

Ha! I already knew that Louis Braille developed braille. I was given a book on him as a child and somehow retained the knowledge. 😂