In 1829, Louis Braille published the Method of Writing Words, Music, and Plain Song by Means of Dots, for Use by the Blind and Arranged by Them. Today, this method - Braille - is used in virtually every language as the standard form of reading and writing by people who are blind, visually mpaired, or deafblind.
Louis Braille was born on January 4, 1809, in Coupvray, a small town near Paris, France. His father was a saddler, and the young Louis enjoyed playing in his father's workshop. When he was three, Louis accidentally punctured his eye with an awl, a sharp tool used to punch holes in leather. Infection eventually set in and spread to his other eye, leaving him completely blind.
Louis developed the Braille system by the time he was 15. With the support of a local priest and schoolteacher, Louis' parents were determined to allow him to develop his demonstrated intelligence. He was enrolled in a regular school where he learned by listening and excelled in his studies. By the age of 10, he earned a scholarship to the Royal Institution for Blind Youth in Paris. There he learned to read letters that were raised on a page. Since these letters were made by pressing shaped copper wire onto a page, it was impossible for people who were blind to write anything for themselves.
At the Institution, Louis was first introduced to a coded system of raised letters. In 1821, a French army captain, Charles Barbier de la Serre, visited the school to introduce his invention, "Night Writing". Night writing was designed for soldiers to communicate at night without speaking. In his system, a series of 12 raised dots were used to represent sounds that, when combined, would form words. It proved to be too complicated, and the army eventually rejected it.
Barbier adapted his system for use by the blind, but the 12-dot phonetic system still proved cumbersome. Recognizing how useful this tactile system could be, Louis set out to experiment with a simplified version. Eventually, he settled on a system based on normal spelling using six dots to represent the standard alphabet. Louis Braille went on to become an admired and respected teacher at the Institution. But even though his system allowed blind people to write using a simple stylus, Braille was not widely used. Plagued by ill health, Louis died of tuberculosis on January 6, 1852.
In 1868, Dr. Thomas Armitage and a group of four blind men founded the British and Foreign Society for Improving the Embossed Literature of the Blind. This organization grew to become the Royal National Institute for the Blind, the largest publisher of Braille in Europe and Britain's largest organization for people who are blind or visually impaired.
The Braille code was eventually recognized for its practicality and simplicity and became a worldwide standard. Today, Braille literacy is as essential as print literacy.
In 1952, the accomplishments of Louis Braille were fully recognized by the French government. His body was exhumed and reburied in the Pantheon, the resting place of France's national heroes.
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发表于 2006-1-4 18:14
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