All About Braille

     Some people think that braille is not used much anymore, but it is actually used quite a bit.  For example: on public restrooms, on elevators and motel, hotel rooms.  
     The talking books for the blind have the titles, authors, copyright dates, as well as book number on the cartridge, and the talking book players have braille to read play, forward, rewind, volume, speed, sleep, tone and power.
     Braille was introduced in 1809, the bicentennial of Louis Braille two years ago.  I still have my Louis Braille bicentennial key chain given to me by Ms Sheila one of my Braille teachers who passed away.
     Louis Braille was blinded by an accident as a small child in France in his father's saddle shop.  It had originally been a way for the French army to read at night using a cell of twelve dots, but to make it simpler it was changed to six for braille.  Louis Braille introduced braille in France and to a school for the blind in America in the early eighteen hundreds.
     The cell consists of six dots in which any combination can make a letter or an abbreviation for a word or part of a word.  For example dots one, two, three and four is p which can also stand or people, and dots two and six stand for en in a word.  Also dots three and five stand for the word in or in inside a word.
     There are two ways to write braille.  One is on a brailler which is like a type writer, very heavy.  The paper is inserted front side down or backwards because you write from right to left in order to make the dots poke out, so that once you turn over the braille paper, you can feel the dots from left to right.  
     Another way to write braille is by hand, requiring a slate, stylus and braille paper.  The paper is clipped on the right between the slate which consists of cells in the form of little windows.  From right to left on the back side of the paper, you press the stylus by feel into the right place inside the cell window, so that once you turn the paper over and have removed the slate, you can feel the dots in order to read from left to right.
     I wrote poetry for practice on both.  I also read a long story to one of my teachers (all my braille teachers were blind and one had a dog we all spoiled) about a man who is a wood maker but wants to be a king and then the sun and on and on until he is once again a wood maker.  It took me two days of one hour class periods to read him the story, but it was challenging and fun.
     Well, so much for braille, but it is not a dying way of reading for the blind at all, and is newer than one might have thought I think.