Today is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Louis Braille.

Louis Braille was born in Coupvray, 25 miles outside of Paris. As a small boy he was blinded by an accident in his father’s workshop. He was inspired by the ‘night writing’ system of raised dots and dashes invented by one of Napoleon’s officers to help soldiers pass messages in the darkness. This system was too complex so Braille set out to simplify it.

Helen Keller summed up Braille’s contribution in a speech she gave at the Sorbonne to mark the centennial of his death:

“On behalf of the blind people of the world, I thank you from the bottom of my heart for having generously recognized the pride and efforts of all those who refuse to succumb to their limitations. In our way, we, the blind, are as indebted to Louis Braille as mankind is to Gutenberg. It is true that the dot system is very different from ordinary print, but these raised letters are, under our fingers, precious seeds from which has grown our intellectual harvest. Without the braille dot system, how incomplete and chaotic our education would be! The dismal doors of frustration would shut us out from the untold treasures of literature, philosophy and science. But, like a magic wand, the six dots of Louis Braille have resulted in schools where embossed books, like vessels, can transport us to ports of education, libraries and all the means of expression that assure our independence.

As Any Ful Kno, the Braille system is based on a cell of six dots which are either raised or not:

“Braille uses a system of small raised dots that are read using the fingertips and can be used to represent everything from words to math and music. The reader’s fingers gently glide over paper that has been embossed with the braille code.

So why should fully sighted computer users be celebrating this day?

Braille is a binary system, and one of several 19th Century inventions that helped begin the Digital Age. Braille’s system of raised dots and unraised dots is not unlike the 0s and 1s of computer language. The six dots of the Braille system generate 64 codes. Remarkably, the Braille system is also much simpler than the Morse system – another nineteenth century ‘binary’ invention.

These inventions were early examples of a new way of presenting information i.e. as simple as possible without which we wouldn’t be on this or any other website today. For more, on the history of this stuff read Charles Petzold’s “Code: The hidden language of computer hardware and software”.