47 Fun Facts About Braille

Which toy was adapted in 2019 so that its pieces spell out braille letters and numbers?

Lego bricks: each Braille Brick keeps only the studs that spell one character and prints the same letter beside them, so blind and sighted children can build and learn side by side.

How does English braille show a capital letter?

A sign before it: a single dot at the foot of a cell says 'capital follows', just as a number sign ahead of a letter turns it into a digit.

How old was Louis Braille when he worked out his code?

Fifteen: by 1824 Braille had built the code in his free time from an army captain's clumsier system of dots, and his classmates took it up at once.

How did Louis Braille lose his sight?

An awl accident in his father's workshop: aged three, he drove the leather punch into one eye, infection spread to the other, and by five he was completely blind.

Louis Braille's birthplace, Coupvray, east of France's capital, now sits beside which attraction?

Disneyland Paris: the resort was laid out across five villages, Coupvray among them, so some of its hotels now stand a short drive from the house where Braille was born.

Alongside their braille, what told gold from silver on the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic medals?

Indents on the edge: one for gold, two for silver, three for bronze, so athletes with sight loss could tell their medals apart by touch, while the face spelled 'Tokyo 2020' in braille.

What made Louis Braille halve an older code's twelve dots?

Fingertip size: the old twelve-dot symbols were taller than the pad of a finger, so readers had to feel up and down each one, while a six-dot cell is read at a single touch.

Before braille, how did books at Louis Braille's school let blind pupils read?

Letters embossed into heavy paper, the method of founder Valentin Haüy, were slow to read and impossible to write by hand; ironically, Braille's own 1829 book explaining his dots was printed this way.

Braille's 1829 system used dots and what other element, dropped by the 1837 edition?

Dashes: Braille's first published alphabet mixed them with dots, but fingers could not easily tell the two apart, so his 1837 edition kept dots alone.

Alongside teaching, which job did Louis Braille hold for years in Paris churches?

Organist: Braille won school prizes for cello and piano, played the organ at Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs from 1834, and made sure his dot code could write music as well as words.

The first full-length book printed in braille, in 1837, was a schoolbook on what subject?

French history: the Précis sur l'histoire de France came out in Braille's dots from his own Paris institute, yet three years later a new director set about curbing the code's use there.

Louis Braille died at 43 after years of a lung illness that doctors diagnosed as what?

Tuberculosis: he lived with the illness for well over a decade, was forced to give up teaching, and died in Paris two days after his forty-third birthday.

When France reburied Louis Braille among its national heroes, which part of him stayed in his home village?

His hands: they stayed in an urn on his original grave in Coupvray as a symbolic gesture, while the rest of his remains went to Paris a century after his death.

Louis Braille's school made his code official only at what point?

Two years after his death, in 1854: pupils had taken up his dots almost at once, but the school's officials took three decades to follow.

Which country's blind schools used rival codes into the 1910s before settling on braille?

The United States: its schools were split between braille, New York Point and other raised types for decades after a Paris congress of 1878 had backed braille as the international standard.

Which part of the cell do the first ten braille letters, a to j, use?

Only the upper four dots: Braille then made k to t by adding one lower dot to the same ten shapes, so a learner who knows ten letters is well on the way to twenty.

Hebrew and Arabic print starts at the right-hand margin; which way is braille in those languages read?

Left to right: Hebrew and Arabic braille follow the international convention set by the French original, so a blind reader's fingers travel the opposite way to the printed line.

Why was w left out of Louis Braille's original sequence?

It was not then a French letter: French uses w only in borrowed words such as wagon, so Braille left it out, and it was added later, out of sequence, as a j with one extra dot.

In braille, the cell for the letter j also stands for which digit?

0: the letters a to i double as the digits 1 to 9, and j, the tenth letter, stands for zero once the cell is marked as a number.

What is the traditional hand tool for writing braille, punching each dot in mirror image from the back?

A slate and stylus: because each dot is pushed out through the back of the page, the writer works from right to left so that the text reads normally once the paper is turned over.

The classic braille typewriter of 1951 is named after which American school for the blind, where Helen Keller studied?

Perkins: teacher David Abraham finished the prototype in 1941, but wartime limits on manufacturing kept the Perkins Brailler off the market for another ten years.

Abraham Nemeth, steered away from the subject by his college advisers, went on to devise a braille code for what?

Mathematics: his college advisers pushed him into psychology, but Nemeth went back for a maths doctorate and devised the code he needed to do the work himself.

How can braille be embossed on both sides of one sheet?

The two sides' dots are offset: in 'interpoint' printing each dot on the back lands in a gap between dots on the front, which cuts the paper a bulky braille book needs.

In contracted English braille, which everyday word shrinks to just the letters a-f-n?

Afternoon: short forms like afn are why almost all English braille books are contracted, since braille cells are far bulkier than print and every saved cell saves paper.

What was uncontracted braille previously known as?

Grade 1 spelled every word out letter by letter; grade 2 added the contractions that nearly all books use to save space, and grade 3 was a loose personal shorthand that was never standardised.

Which men's magazine did the US Library of Congress begin publishing in braille, articles only, in 1970?

Playboy: Congress withheld the funding in 1985, but a federal judge ruled the next year that dropping the braille edition violated blind readers' First Amendment rights.

Eight-dot braille, used on computer displays, adds its two extra dots where?

Below the bottom row: the cell grows to four dots high, giving 256 patterns, enough for every keyboard character, capitals included, to fit in a single cell.

Valentin Haüy, founder of the Paris school where Louis Braille later studied, found his first pupil doing what?

Begging for alms: Haüy met young François Lesueur in 1784 and made him his first pupil, and the boy learned so quickly that backers soon helped Haüy open a school.

What does a refreshable braille display use to form characters?

Pins that rise and fall: round-tipped pins push up through holes in a flat strip to form each cell, then reset to show the next stretch of text, so one short row can display a whole document.

What special treatment do braille books and letters for blind readers get in the US mail?

Free postage: braille volumes are far bulkier than print, so 'free matter for the blind' spares readers the cost, and postal services around the world offer the same exemption.

How do Canadian banknotes tell blind users their value by touch?

By the number of full braille cells: a $5 carries one six-dot block, a $10 two and a $20 three, a system the Bank of Canada chose because not every blind user reads braille.

Which Bank of England note, its first printed on polymer, is the only one without raised dots for blind users?

£5: the fiver arrived in 2016, a year before the £10 brought in clusters of raised dots, so the Bank of England tells blind users to know it by the smooth corner where the dots would be.

Which state's 2003 quarter shows Helen Keller with her name in both print and braille?

Alabama: the state chose its native daughter, born in Tuscumbia in 1880, and gave the coin the motto 'Spirit of Courage'.

In the United Kingdom, what product is legally required to carry its name in braille on the packaging?

Medicines: every pack must carry the product's name in braille so that a blind patient can tell one box from another, and the regulator insists it is spelled out in full, with no contractions.

World Braille Day falls on 4 January to mark what?

Louis Braille's birth, in 1809: the United Nations has marked the day since 2019 to press the case for braille as a route to equal rights, and by coincidence he died just two days after a birthday.

What is 9969 Braille, which NASA's Deep Space 1 probe flew past in 1999?

An asteroid: discovered in 1992 and later named for Louis Braille, it was passed at about 26 km by Deep Space 1, but a navigation fault meant the few pictures sent back were out of focus.

What was new about the braille on the 2009 Louis Braille silver dollar?

It was readable by touch: the US Mint hailed the first American coin with braille a finger could read, six years after a state quarter had carried Helen Keller's name in reduced-size dots.

Rather than the shape of each character, what does mainland Chinese braille spell out?

The sound of each syllable: one cell gives the opening consonant, one the rest of the syllable and a third the tone, which writers usually leave out because context makes the word clear.

Braille, devised in the 1820s, is often described as an early example of what kind of code?

Binary: every dot in a cell is either raised or flat, the same two-state logic as a computer bit, which is why a braille cell maps directly onto six bits.

Which 1990 US law is the reason elevators, restrooms and hotel rooms across the country carry braille signs?

The Americans with Disabilities Act: its standards require signs for permanent rooms to repeat their raised letters in braille, and to sit at doorways, where a blind visitor knows to feel for them.

Which Mattel card game was reissued in 2019 as a braille deck developed with the National Federation of the Blind?

UNO: each card carries braille in one corner to identify it, so blind and sighted players can share a single deck straight out of the box, though everyone calls out the card they play.

In people blind from early life, brain scans show that reading braille activates which region normally devoted to another sense?

The visual cortex: in braille readers blind from early life, the areas normally reserved for sight light up during touch tasks, while in sighted volunteers the same areas quieten down.

On the centenary of his death, Louis Braille's remains were moved to which Paris landmark?

The Panthéon: Braille lies there among Voltaire, Victor Hugo and Marie Curie, a century after his family had buried him in the village cemetery at Coupvray.

The back cover of Paul McCartney's 1973 album Red Rose Speedway carries a braille message to which musician?

Stevie Wonder: the dots spell out a message of love from the band, and nine years later the two men shared a number one with their duet Ebony and Ivory.

The bumpy yellow paving that guides blind pedestrians, known at home as 'braille blocks', was invented in which country?

Japan: Seiichi Miyake devised the tiles in 1965 and the first were laid in Okayama two years later; the Japanese name borrows the word for braille, and the idea has since spread worldwide.

Which fingers do the fastest braille readers typically use?

Both index fingers: in the 'scissors' method the right finger finishes a line while the left is already finding the start of the next, so no time is lost between lines.

Whose twelve-dot 'night writing', shown at Louis Braille's school in 1821, gave him the idea for braille?

Charles Barbier: the artillery captain's code spelled sounds, not letters, and was long said to be for soldiers signalling at night, though his own writings suggest he had blind readers in mind.