Braille, Louis

Braille, Louis (1809-52), teacher, b. France.

Braille became blind following an accident when he was three.

At the age of ten, he entered the School for the Blind in Paris. There he learned music and became a church organist.

He remained at the school as a teacher and invented a system for reading by touch.

He used an alphabet made up of a series of raised dots, a little similar to the binary language computers use .

Today the Braille alphabet is used by blind people in many countries.

See Russell Freedman Out of Darkness: The Story of Louis Braille