- Why braille?
- Braille at the Library of Congress and NLS
- Briefs
- Supporting tribal libraries
- NLS sticker wins design award
- Top BARD downloads
Braille 200 Special Issue
Celebrating Louis Braille and the bicentennial of braille
Louis Braille was born in the village of Coupvray near Paris on January 4, 1809. One day, when he was three, he was playing with a sharp tool belonging to his father, a harness maker. He accidentally injured one eye with the tool, then developed an infection that later caused total blindness.
In 1821, when he was 12, Braille learned of a code developed for “night writing” and recognized in it a basis for written communication for people who were blind. While enrolled at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, Braille spent several years developing the system of raised dots that has come to be known by his name.
Some countries and organizations cite 1824 as the year braille was created and marked the anniversary last year. We’ve opted to go along with Braille’s native France and the European Blind Union and celebrate the 200th anniversary this year.
Below, you’ll find a story explaining how braille became the global standard for tactile writing and a timeline of developments in braille library service at the Library of Congress and NLS. Throughout the year, you can find more content about the history and importance of braille on our website at www.loc.gov/nls/braille-200.
How Louis Braille's creation became the global standard for tactile writing
By Claire Rojstaczer
When Louis Braille developed his six-dot system 200 years ago, he had no idea that it would become the standard for tactile writing around the globe. He only knew that existing systems—developed by sighted people—were inefficient to read by touch and often impossible to write by hand. His system survived and thrived because Louis Braille understood the needs of its users. But it took nearly a century to become ascendant, and its various codes continue to be refined even today.
The earliest tactile writing used in educating the blind was simply printed Latin characters, reversed and embossed deeply into the page using thick, damp paper on existing printing presses. (You’ll sometimes see inkless letterpress embossing like that today, used for decorative elements on ornate wedding invitations and stationery.) Developed in late eighteenth century France by Valentin Haüy, an early proponent of educating blind children, it was difficult for many pupils to read due to the complexity of its curves and lines. And, of course, there was no way to write it without access to a press.
Charles Barbier, another Frenchman, was the first to propose using dots instead of lines in the 1810s. “Night writing” or “point writing,” as he called it, could be pricked into paper without need for ink and read while on a dark battlefield or road. He theorized that it might help the blind but admitted he had not put that theory into practice. The l’Académie Royale des Sciences saw its potential, and by 1821 Louis Braille, then 12 years old, had experienced it at his school and started to develop his own alternative.
Barbier’s dot-based system used a 6 x 2 grid. That made characters too large to read by simply running fingers across the paper, left to right; blind students had to move their fingers up and down to distinguish each character. Barbier also favored a phonetic approach that offered little guidance for how words were spelled.
Braille’s innovation was to simplify the system into 3 x 2 grids, each representing a single letter of the alphabet—and to add numbers, punctuation and other necessary characters. He also made sure that each character was clearly distinct from the others. Only one braille character, for example, uses a single dot in Louis Braille’s system for the Latin alphabet: the letter “a.”
Not everyone was quick to embrace braille. For decades, competing systems of embossed characters fought for prominence. Systems that used shapes similar to printed characters, rather than dots, were thought to be easier to learn for people who lost their sight as adults. Moon type, developed in the 1840s by William Moon and based on highly stylized versions of Latin alphabet letters, was one of the most popular, and remained widely used in England well into the 20th century.
Alternate dot-based systems were also in widespread use. When the Library of Congress opened its first Reading Room for the Blind in 1897, a contemporary newspaper reported that its shelves held not braille but “ordinary raised letters [and] . . . ‘New York points.’” Developed in the 1860s, New York Point used 2 x 4 grids. While never widely adopted outside of the United States, it remained a serious domestic competitor to braille until the 1920s.
In the US, the struggle to settle on one standard became known as the “war of the dots.” Helen Keller herself weighed in on the side of braille, but many favored whatever system was most familiar to them. After a decade of study, the American Association of Workers for the Blind settled on a variant of English braille known as Grade One and a Half, which was officially adopted in the US in 1917.
The “One and a Half” referred to its position halfway between “Grade One,” or uncontracted braille, and “Grade Two,” or contracted braille, which was widely in use in the UK. Contracted braille used single cells to represent multiple characters, which allowed more text to be brailled on a single sheet of paper. Meanwhile, British institutions continued to use their own version of braille, which had four times as many contractions as the American version.
It took until 1932 for British and American representatives to agree on a single Standard English Braille code, and even then, differences remained in implementation between the two countries. That division would only widen over time, with a new version of English Braille, American Edition, adopted in the US in 1959.
The quest for a single English braille code continued. Seven countries—Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Nigeria, South Africa, the UK and the US—eventually formed the International Council on English Braille, which held its inaugural meeting in 1991 with the goal of continued progress toward standardization. A final draft of Unified English Braille (UEB) was approved in 2004. The US became the last member country to adopt the code in 2012, bringing the English-speaking world into a single standard for tactile printing for the first time in history. (The US completed implementation of UEB in 2016.)
Meanwhile, more than a hundred other distinct braille codes continue to be used around the globe, representing languages from Afrikaans to Yoruba. They use different punctuation, different contractions and different alphabets or syllabaries—but the basic system of dots designed by Louis Braille two centuries ago endures.
This article was sourced primarily from Braille into the Next Millennium, published by NLS in 2000. Additional information came from “Charles Barbier: A Hidden Story” by Philippa Campsie in the Spring 2021 issue of Disability Studies Quarterly.
Braille at the Library of Congress
1897: The Library of Congress opens a Reading Room for the Blind in what is now the Thomas Jefferson Building. Members of the local blind community are encouraged to come and read on premises from a selection of approximately 500 raised-character titles.
1904: Congress expands Free Matter for the Blind, a postal category established in 1899 to cover raised-character letters, including raised-character books and magazines, paving the way for braille library service by mail.
1918: Reading Room for the Blind librarian Gertrude Rider begins a volunteer braille transcribing service in collaboration with the American Red Cross.
1931: The Pratt-Smoot Act establishes Books for the Adult Blind, allowing the Library of Congress to use public funding to produce and distribute braille reading materials around the country.
1932: British and American representatives agree to adopt Standard English Braille. Despite the name, slight differences remain in how braille is implemented between the countries, with Britain choosing not to adopt capital letters. NLS begins loaning books produced using the new code in 1933.
1959: Braille printing houses adopt English Braille, American Edition, as the standard for braille produced in the US. A revision of Standard English Braille, it uses a different set of contractions believed to better serve readers.
1962: Congress expands the mandate of the Library’s Division for the Blind to include music, allowing the circulation of braille musical scores.
1978: NLS releases Introduction to Braille Mathematics as a training tool for transcribers. The first group of students trained in the Nemeth braille code for math and science notation received their NLS certifications in 1980.
1979: NLS produces and publishes Bettye Krolick’s Dictionary of Braille Music Signs, standardizing many aspects of braille music. Krolick will continue to revise and update documentation of the braille music code for decades.
1995: NLS releases its 10,000th braille book, Brother Eagle, Sister Sky.
1999: NLS formally releases Web-Braille, a system for distributing electronic braille books over the Internet. Any patron with a refreshable braille device or embosser can now receive braille books immediately, without waiting for mail delivery.
2013: NLS and Perkins School for the Blind co-host the Braille Summit, a four-day conference to discuss the future of braille literacy in the US.
The BARD Mobile app for iOS allows NLS patrons with Bluetooth-enabled refreshable braille displays to download and read braille books using a mobile device.
2016: NLS adopts Unified English Braille, a revision to the braille code developed by the International Council on English Braille to standardize braille codes across English-speaking countries.
An amendment to the Pratt-Smoot Act allows NLS to develop and distribute refreshable braille displays. The first NLS Braille eReaders are released to patron testers in 2017.
2020: NLS begins sharing its digitized braille collection with authorized entities in other countries thanks to the Marrakesh Treaty. The first NLS book downloaded in another country is Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood.
2022: The BARD Mobile app for Android is updated to support braille reading with Bluetooth-enabled refreshable braille displays.
NLS launches the Braille-on-Demand pilot project, allowing its patrons to make monthly requests for hard-copy braille books that they can keep indefinitely, separate from the regular system for limited-term library loans.
2024: NLS’ Braille eReader becomes available to all interested patrons. By the end of the year, approximately 8,500 eReaders are in the hands of patrons and network libraries.
—Compiled by Claire Rojstaczer
Briefs
By the numbers: the NLS collection
Total items circulated last year:
Audio downloads: 4,257,667
Digital audio cartridge: 17,595,782
Ebraille downloads: 447,709
Hard-copy braille: 157,557
Total items in collection: 355,102
Total items on BARD*: 184,230
Books available in audio: 131,694
Books available in ebraille: 20,951
Magazine issues available: 23,025
Music collection items available: 9,178
Books available in hard-copy braille: 28,517
*BARD is the NLS Braille and Audio Reading Download service
Numbers are for FY 2024 (October 1, 2023, through September 30, 2024)
Third edition of The Rules of English Braille available
The International Council on English Braille has released a third edition of The Rules of Unified English Braille (UEB), the first update since 2013. This edition introduces a comprehensive index of all rules and incorporates many changes to the UEB code, including new rules for quotation marks and new additions to the Shortforms List. To download the publication in PDF or BRF, visit www.iceb.org.
Accessible tax forms from the IRS
Did you know the IRS has accessible tax forms? Visit www.irs.gov/forms-pubs/accessible-irs-tax-products to download braille and large-print tax documents or call 800-829-3676 to request paper copies. You can also call the accessibility helpline at 833-690-0598 with any questions.
NLS builds a collection for patrons who use tribal libraries
By Kaley Harman
During an NLS open house ahead of the 2022 American Library Association conference in Washington, DC, Alice O’Reilly, chief of the NLS Collections Division, struck up a conversation with Liana Morales, a grants manager for the New Mexico State Library.
When she learned Morales had also been a rural route bookmobile driver on the Navajo Nation reservation, O’Reilly had a question for her.
“I asked her, with all the hubris of my inexperience, how well NLS was meeting the needs of people on the reservation from the collections perspective,” O’Reilly recalls. “And she plainly told me: not at all.”
The NLS collection had few audio or braille books about the Navajo Nation, and none in the Navajos’ Diné language.
“The accessible books available from NLS just didn’t resonate with the Navajo Nation community,” O’Reilly says.
As a result of that conversation, she began thinking critically about what the people who are served by tribal libraries would want to find in the NLS collection. And it started her journey to build a representative accessible collection for NLS patrons who use tribal libraries.
O’Reilly had a follow-up meeting with staff from the New Mexico State Library, who encouraged her to attend the Association of Tribal Libraries, Archives and Museums (ATALM) conference later that year. There she met Joy Bridwell, a Chippewa Cree tribal librarian from Box Elder, Montana, and Cindy Hohl, now president of the American Library Association. They and others gave her practical advice about how to develop the NLS collection.
“Through conversations with each of them, I got the support and encouragement to pursue the idea that it was essential to work directly with tribal librarians to determine the right approach,” O’Reilly says. “They know what their communities are reading—including many books by local indigenous authors that I never would have identified.”
With the support of funds from Friends of the Library of Congress, the Library’s largest community of annual donors, O’Reilly set off on the first phase of her project. Last June, she and Brandon Roe of the NLS Media Lab traveled to Stone Child College in Montana, a tribally controlled community college and Bridwell’s home library, to record books in English and Cree using Cree narrators.
“I was super excited about the opportunity and immediately wanted to get my students, staff, and community involved,” Bridwell says.
Volunteers joined NLS staff in the makeshift recording booth, many narrating books for the first time. One woman drove five hours to record.
Titles they recorded by indigenous authors included Siha Tooskin Knows the Gifts of His People by Charlene Bearhead and Wilson Bearhead, We Dream Medicine Dreams by Lisa Boivin, We Sang You Home by Richard Van Camp and Who Am I? by Julie Buchholtz.
The new narrators were particularly proud to have their names appear in the Library of Congress card catalog and to see that this local work would have a national reach, O’Reilly says.
The 15 audiobooks they recorded have made it possible for children of the Chippewa Cree tribe with visual or print disabilities to participate in reading stories in a rich, engaging and authentic way—where “someone who sounds like home is reading you a book about home,” O’Reilly says. That in turn has enriched and increased the overall value of the NLS collections.
This small but significant start has opened the door for new NLS engagement with tribal libraries across the country.
“There are so many amazing tribal libraries with fantastic and unique collections that we would love to make available to people with print disabilities,” O’Reilly says. “The rates of disability on reservations can be high, and making sure that people with print disabilities are able to access books and magazines that are reflective of their unique community is so important.”
NLS sticker illustration wins national design award
By Mark Schwartz
A custom illustration for an NLS promotional sticker—created by an artist who was a patron herself—has won a design award from Graphic Design USA magazine.
The sticker, produced by the US Government Publishing Office (GPO), depicts some of NLS’ youngest patrons using NLS services and materials.
It shows three students sitting cross-legged in a classroom reading nook. One reads with a tablet and headphones, another holds a book and a third reads a braille book with a white cane nearby. The text above the students says, “Read Your Way,” and the text below conveys NLS contact information.
GPO will also produce a version of the sticker with text in braille.
NLS will give away the stickers at exhibits and other public events as a reminder that it provides books in both audio and braille and that people with reading disabilities, as well as those with visual or physical disabilities, can enroll.
The GPO designer who created the illustration, Ché Saitta-Zelterman, felt a personal connection to it.
“As a child and young adult with a learning disability, I received NLS books to help me with my required readings for school,” she says. “Without having the resources that NLS provides, high school would have been tough for me because of my dyslexia. NLS talking books saved me.”
Working on this illustration, she says, was a way to return the favor to NLS and to proudly demonstrate the sticker’s message—and what NLS allowed Saitta-Zelterman to do: “Read Your Way.”
By the numbers: 2024's most popular BARD downloads
Ever-growing numbers of NLS patrons are taking advantage of BARD—our Braille and Audio Reading Download service—to get instant access to hundreds of thousands of books, magazines and music materials in audio and electronic braille (ebraille). These are the Top 10 books that NLS patrons downloaded from BARD in 2024. All downloads were in audio except for Jessie De La Cruz, which was in ebraille.
- A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (Classics) 42,037 downloads
- The Proof of the Pudding by Rhys Bowen (Mystery) 18,657 downloads
- The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight by Andrew Leland (Biography) 15,962 downloads
- Ravenfall by Kalyn Josephson (Adventure, Juvenile Fiction) 12,070 downloads
- Evocation by S.T. Gibson (Fantasy) 10,168 downloads
- Dynasty: The Stuarts, 1560–1807 by John Macleod (Biography of Heads of State and Political Figures) 9,356 downloads
- The Farmer's Bride; Rancher's Bride; Butcher's Bride by Jaclyn Hardy (Religious Fiction) 9,114 downloads
- The Rabbi and the Hit Man: A True Tale of Murder, Passion, and Shattered Faith by Arthur J. Magida (True Crime) 8,317 downloads
- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (Classics) 8,168 downloads
- Jessie De La Cruz: A Profile of a United Farm Worker by Gary Soto (Biography, Young Adult) 7,989 downloads