At 15, Louis Braille began transforming a military night code into the reading system now used worldwide

The lack of reading techniques for blind individuals bothered Louis Braille throughout his teenage years. As explained by Encyclopedia Britannica, the Frenchman had gone blind due to an accident that resulted in injury to one of his eyes while infection befell the other one not long after. He would later join what was reportedly one of the earliest institutions in the world specifically designed for blind children, namely the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris. The reading technique used there, however, was extremely difficult and inconvenient, as it required large volumes of books with large-print text to be laboriously traced by the students’ fingers.

Everything seemed so different after Louis Braille discovered “night writing,” a form of communication created by the French army officer Charles Barbier. He developed a method for soldiers to read messages without using any light, and it was done by creating dots on paper and reading by touch. As explained by the American Foundation for the Blind, Charles Barbier showed his invention at the institute in Paris in the early 1820s, captivating Braille immediately.

Braille simplified the military code into something fingers could read rapidly

It is not the invention itself that made Braille so unique, but his insight into why Barbier's system did not work. Barbier's military code system used a cumbersome 12-dot configuration based on sound combinations rather than individual letters, which made it hard to remember and awkward to read quickly through one's fingers. Braille saw how simple it would be for the human finger to process something encoded in just a few dots. As explained by the National Federation of the Blind, Braille worked tirelessly on refining the military code into a neat 6-dot system for letters, punctuation, musical notes, and numbers.


Each character could be easily read under one’s fingertips and recognized completely without the slow process of tracing a huge symbol across the page. It used organized combinations, thereby simplifying the process of understanding and expanding on it. It became very personal to him because it addressed an issue that affected the entire field of education for the blind at the time. Educationally speaking, the blind could not access books and letters or learn independently because of their inability to read, thus, it is clear that Braille was not coming up with a solution to the problem as an external inventor would; instead, he was reinventing something he himself required. According to UNESCO, Louis Braille came up with the first version of his solution in 1829 when he was still quite young.

The system spread slowly because many educators resisted change initially

The most surprising part of the Braille story lies in the slow acceptance of the system, even after it proved quite effective. Teachers were more willing to use visually lettered books, since they could decipher the text on their own. Braille’s dot system provided the blind a completely different approach, namely, independence. The students from the Paris institute began using Braille almost immediately before the educational community accepted the system, and this contradiction demonstrates that there was a struggle for accessibility in the nineteenth century. Most of the systems developed for the blind focused on the ease of reading by the sighted teacher.

The irony that accompanies this tale is remarkable even now: an information system originally created for soldiers traveling through the darkness became the basis for literacy used by blind readers worldwide. The idea of using raised dots as a communication method was not initially developed by Louis Braille; however, what Braille saw in those raised dots was the future potential of a system that had been designed improperly for human use. It was his contribution as a young man in a Parisian classroom that changed everything about tactile reading. Braille is found throughout the world today in books, elevators, packages, signs, and many other forms of assistive technology, yet the system originated in the hands of a blind teenager.