Jasour: News- Desk
Special needs individuals, numbering around one billion people worldwide, are among the least socially advantaged groups in terms of accessing healthcare, education, employment, and community participation, even under normal circumstances.
Visually Impaired Special Needs Individuals: Visually impaired special needs individuals face significant living challenges, especially during lockdowns, concerning independence and isolation for those who rely on touch to communicate their needs and access information.
Since 2019, World Braille Day has been celebrated to raise awareness about the importance of Braille as a means of communication in realizing the full human rights of blind and visually impaired people.
In 1819, ten-year-old Louis Braille became the youngest student to be admitted to the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris. Passionate about reading and writing from an early age, Braille was shocked to learn that the school library contained only three books.
This was because the only system at the time for printing books for the blind was embossed letters. Printers carved wooden blocks in the shape of each letter (in reverse) and pressed them onto thick sheets of wax paper, producing rows of large embossed print. With practice, a small blind person could learn to read embossed letters with their fingers, but very few books were made this way.
Path to Success
Years later, Braille recalled his first impression as a talented blind student facing the prospect of being cut off from the world of knowledge and discovery.
Braille said, “If my eyes do not tell me about men, events, ideas, and beliefs, I must find another way. If I cannot discover a way to read and write, to understand the life around me and the life of the past, I will end my life.” Thanks to inspiration and effort, Louis Braille created a simple and elegant system that allowed the blind and visually impaired to read quickly and almost effortlessly, all before his sixteenth birthday, according to History.com.
In the fall of 1824, at fifteen years old, Braille presented his system of raised dots to the director of the Royal Institute, Dr. Alexandre-René Pignier. Braille sat upright with his pen, ruler, and paper while Pignier read aloud from a long article.
“You can write faster,” said young Braille, his pen jumping across the page. A decade later, Braille was featured at an exhibition in Paris, printing 2,500 dots per minute.
When Pignier finished reading the article, Braille returned to the beginning of what he had written, ran his fingers over the raised dots, and recited the entire text verbatim.
The school director immediately began teaching Braille’s system of raised dots at the Royal Institute and wrote to the French Minister of the Interior, recommending the nationwide adoption of Braille’s technique. However, this recommendation was ignored.
At nineteen, Braille became the first blind professor at the Royal Institute and finally published his system of raised dots in a book titled “Method of Writing Words, Music, and Plain Songs by Means of Dots, for Use by the Blind and Arranged for Them.”
It took nearly a century for the world to fully adopt the Braille system as the official writing system for the blind and visually impaired.
After long battles over alternative systems like the New York Point System, the English-speaking world agreed on a unified Braille system in 1932. The revolutionary Braille dot system was not adopted outside the Royal Institute during Braille’s lifetime.
In 1852, Braille died of tuberculosis at the age of only 43.
What is Braille? Braille is a tactile representation of alphabetic and numerical symbols using six dots to represent each letter and number, including musical, mathematical, and scientific symbols. Blind and visually impaired people use Braille, named after its 19th-century French inventor Louis Braille, to read the same books and periodicals printed in visible font, ensuring access to vital information, which is a measure of competence, independence, and equality.
As outlined in Article 2 of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, Braille is a means of communication for the blind, crucial in education, freedom of expression and opinion, access to information, written communication, and social inclusion as detailed in Articles 21 and 24 of the convention.
