January 4th is World Braille Day! On this day, we celebrate efforts to make communities more accessible [easy for someone with a disability to engage with] to people living with vision impairment. Braille is a coded system of raised dots that blind people use to read.
The United Nations proclaimed World Braille Day in 2018. The UN supports efforts to promote literacy around the world. Encouraging the use of Braille is part of this literacy effort. About 36 million people around the world are blind. A further 217 million people live with moderate to severe vision impairment. Many of these people do not have access to Braille. But groups like the World Blind Union have programs that promote Braille literacy in developing countries.
January 4th was chosen as World Braille Day because it is Louis Braille’s birthday. Louis Braille was a French educator born in 1809. He was blinded in an accident at the age of three. At 15 years old he developed a system to help blind people read. In the system, a group of raised dots represents a letter of the alphabet. The system is also used to represent numbers, sounds, and whole words.
Many popular and classic books can be found in Braille. Since 1923, the National Braille Press (NBP) has produced Braille books for visually impaired readers. They print more than just books, too. In 2021, the NBP created thousands of Braille menus for Starbucks!
Braille is used on many different things other than books. Have you ever heard of a Rubik’s cube? It’s a cube-shaped puzzle made up of smaller, movable cubes. The face of each cube has a color on it. To solve the puzzle, you move the small cubes around until all the colors are grouped together. But people with vision impairment can have difficulty solving the puzzle. So, someone invented a Rubik’s cube with Braille instead of colors!
Over the years, Braille has helped millions of visually impaired people to read and learn. On January 4th, we celebrate this system and its creator. We also celebrate the efforts of so many people around the world who work to support accessible learning for visually impaired people.
What Do You Think? How has Braille made a difference for blind and visually impaired people?
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