Breathe
By Edmée Pardo
Louis Braille was born in France in 1809, the son of a saddler. In an accident in his father's workshop, Louis injured one eye, which later infected the other, and by the age of five he was totally blind. It is said that when blindness occurs at an early age, very little, if not nothing, is remembered of the faces of family members, of the world, of its colors and its lights. It is also said that the lack of vision limits the facial expressions of those who look with surprise, disgust, fear, love, and their gestures are almost null. This explains the gesture in the images we have of him.
Despite the cultural and economic limitations of the Braille family, Louis was sent to a school for blind children in Paris, described as a pigsty when it suits him best, which gave the blind a chance. There they were educated in a reading system called Haüy, which was accessed with large raised print letters that were difficult to follow with the fingers.
Louis was a remarkable student, learning history, mathematics, music by word of mouth. He was deeply inspired when he learned about the system of Charles Barbier, a lieutenant who had created a code of raised dots so that soldiers could read messages in the dark. Although this system was not useful for the military, as it was a sonography of French, from the age of 15 Louis began to modify and simplify it until he created what we know today as the Braille system, which has been in use for 200 years.
The Braille system is an alphabet composed of 63 characters, made up of one to six dots, which are arranged in different ways and printed in relief to form a language that can be read by touch. When used in languages other than French, the combinations change in meaning. For example, the capital letter and period signs vary from Spanish to French. It should be noted that this system is also used for musical notation, which was a great contribution since hearing is the most developed sense for those with sight limitations. Braille and his friend Pierre Focoult developed a machine for writing this alphabet known as the raffigraph.
The rafígrafo looks like a board with a bird's feather: there are ten levers arranged in a semicircle, each with a key and a punch, which allows the mechanized printing of Braille texts and that, despite my documentary research, I was never able to see in use on the Internet. What I did see, however, was a glimpse of the workshop where the free textbooks are printed on a computer, and a complex machine that works by punching prints the sheets.
It is said that Louis Braille was also a church organist, musician and pedagogue. His system allows to integrate, as far as possible, the blind with society because they acquire written references and can read a part of the world with their fingers.
The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of the company. Opinion 51.
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