What Is Braille? Six Dots and a Complete Writing System

Before braille, blind readers were given raised versions of ordinary letters, embossed into heavy paper, which could be read slowly and could not be written by the reader at all. Louis Braille lost his sight in an accident at three and encountered, as a pupil at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, a system devised by Charles Barbier, a French army officer, using twelve raised dots to encode sounds so that messages could be read in darkness without speaking. It worked and the cell was too large for a fingertip to take in at once. Braille reduced it to six dots, reorganised the assignments logically, added punctuation, and published the system in 1829 at the age of twenty. The institute where he taught resisted it for years, partly because sighted instructors could not read it easily, and it was formally adopted in France only in 1854, two years after he died. It spread internationally over the following decades and now exists in adapted form for most written languages.

The six positions are numbered one to three down the left column and four to six down the right, and the assignments follow a deliberate pattern rather than being arbitrary:

• •The first ten letters, a to j, use only the top four dots, positions one, two, four and five
• •The next ten, k to t, repeat those same shapes with dot three added
• •The following letters repeat them again with dots three and six added, an elegance interrupted by w, which was absent from the French alphabet of the period and was added later out of sequence
• •Numbers reuse the letters a to j preceded by a number sign, so counting requires no new shapes
• •Prefix cells signal capitals, italics and other formatting, since a dot pattern cannot be made bold
• •Specialised codes extend the same cell to mathematics and science, to music with its own full notation, and to computer notation, several of which use eight dots rather than six to gain more combinations

Writing every letter individually produces enormous volumes, because embossed dots need space and cannot be shrunk, so a printed novel becomes several heavy books. The response is contraction, a system of abbreviations in which single cells stand for common words and letter groups. In English this is called grade two, and it contains around 180 contractions: a single cell for the, and, for, with and of, letter groups such as ch, sh, th, ing and ed, and shortened spellings in which a few letters stand for a whole word. It reduces volume by roughly a quarter to a third and raises reading speed substantially, and it must be learned as a second layer on top of the alphabet, which is the main reason braille takes real effort to acquire. Uncontracted braille, grade one, spells everything out and is used for beginners, for unfamiliar words and for anything where exact spelling matters.

A skilled reader moves one or both hands lightly across the line at speeds commonly reported between 100 and 150 words a minute, with two-handed readers using one hand to finish a line while the other locates the next. Writing is done in several ways: a slate and stylus, in which dots are punched from the back and the writing proceeds right to left so that the dots read correctly when the page is turned over; a braille writer, a mechanical typewriter with six keys plus a space, in which the fingers press combinations simultaneously to form a cell; and electronic notetakers. The device that changed daily use most is the refreshable braille display, a row of cells whose pins rise and fall under electronic control, letting a blind user read a computer screen, a phone or an electronic book in braille rather than only by speech. They remain expensive, because each cell needs its own set of controllable pins, and reducing that cost is an active area of engineering.

Text to speech is cheap, fast and everywhere, and its availability has coincided with a marked decline in braille literacy, with estimates in several countries suggesting that only a small minority of blind children now learn it. That has been argued about seriously, because listening and reading are not equivalent. Braille gives direct access to spelling, punctuation, layout, paragraph structure and mathematical notation, none of which audio conveys reliably, and studies consistently associate braille literacy with higher employment rates and educational attainment. It also permits silent reading, reading in noise, and reading alongside listening to something else. The practical conclusion reached by most educators is that speech and braille are complementary rather than competing, and the sensible target is fluency in both. Beyond continuous reading, the code appears in everyday public life on lift buttons, medicine packaging, currency and signage, where a few cells convey what a sighted person reads at a glance.

Braille arranges six dots in a cell small enough for one fingertip to read without moving, giving sixty-three combinations, and Louis Braille built it in 1829 from a twelve-dot military night-writing system. The letter assignments follow a pattern in which the first ten shapes are reused with extra dots added, and numbers reuse letters after a prefix. Contracted braille abbreviates common words and letter groups to cut bulk. Refreshable displays put it on screens, and it gives access to spelling and notation that audio cannot.