Louis Braille Biography

Louis Braille was a French educationist, who is regarded as one of the greatest contributors to the field of reading and writing systems for the visually impaired. Braille used to visit his father’s leather workshop and often worked with pieces of leather when he was a child; however, he injured his eyes in an accident when he was trying to pierce a piece of leather. The injury was the reason why he went blind at the age of five. His parents tried to give him a standard education and when he was grown up he was sent to Paris to study at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth. It was at the institute that Braille came into contact with a reading system for blind people and later on he met with Charles Barbier, who showed the reading system that he had invented on his own. It proved to be the inspiration for Braille to design his own reading system for blind people and the most important feature of his reading system was its simplicity as well as the fact that blind people could also write using his system. Although Braille’s system did not get enough recognition during his lifetime, it became the universal reading and writing system for blind people in the subsequent years.