The Politics of Braille

Braille, the tactile writing system used by blind people across the globe is a writing system which is easily identified as being linked with blind people and blindness. It may be the first thing, perhaps along with guide dogs, that people think of when asked what they associate with blindness. Yet the adoption of Braille has been an arduous process fought for tirelessly by blind people. Even today, as initiatives to get more children reading and increase literacy rates are championed by celebrities and political leaders alike, blind people are denied the right to learn to read and write. It could be argued that there is a crisis in the blind community, yet it is one that goes mostly ignored and unchallenged by the mainstream media and political parties.

Before the creation of the Braille writing system, a number of sighted educators had designed methods that might be used to teach blind children to read. Valentin Haüy, the sighted head teacher at the Institute for the Blind in Paris created books by embossing print letters from the Latin alphabet on paper, so that blind children might read them. To him, this was an effective way of reading, yet the blind pupils found it lacking. The books were fragile and difficult to produce, but crucially this system only enabled blind people to read, not write. Blind people who wanted to write letters were still expected to learn to write in print, and there was no way for two blind people to communicate in writing with one another.

Louis Braille refined a tactile communication system created by Charles Barbier, which he believed had potential as a reading and writing system for blind people. He reduced the number of dots in a cell from 12 to 6 and replaced the use of a cell so that it represented letters, rather than phonetic sounds. By 1824 his system was complete, though he would refine it further over the years to include contractions, where cells would represent combinations of letters, and create a code for use as musical notation.

The system created by Braille had obvious advantages over more print like writing systems. Blind people could learn the code relatively easily, teaching it to one another with few materials required. It could be used to create books, but also for personal communication, as blind people could both read and write it. As a result, it was quickly adopted by the blind children at the Institute for the Blind.

Despite the response from blind people, sighted educators vehemently opposed the tactile system created by Braille. It did not resemble print, and so without learning it themselves, they were unable to read and write it. Braille’s system was not only difficult for sighted people to read, they may have felt directly threatened by it. If blind people were able to read and write effectively, it would be much easier for them to obtain a higher level of education. If this situation occurred, sighted teachers of blind students might have found themselves forced out of their jobs, replaced by blind candidates. Although it was their mission to educate the blind, they did so in a limited sense. For if the blind were truly educated the role of the sighted benefactor would be obsolete.

The opposition to Braille went so far that a headmaster at the school in Paris was dismissed from his job for allowing a book to be produced in Braille and was replaced by Pierre-Armand Dufau. Dufau thought that Braille would threaten his position as a sighted educator and argued that it should be replaced by Boston Line Type, another system that resembled print. It wasn’t only the Braille system that came under threat. In the 1840s, Pierre-Armand Dufau, the then head of the school, burnt more than 70 books using the Haüy system. He insisted that every book in Braille be collected and burnt on a bonfire in the courtyard of the school, along with the tools for writing Braille. The entire library of the school was destroyed.

Dufau also banned both the teaching and use of Braille at the school. If a student was found to be using Braille they would be punished by being sent to bed without dinner, or by being slapped across the hands. Despite this, as Louis Braille was employed as a teacher at the school he ensured that his students learnt his tactile writing system. Blind people now had a way to share their thoughts with one another, and to keep personal writings. A number of blind people began to write stories and accounts of blindness, which made their lives more accessible to a sighted audience. Once more, this eroded the control that sighted educators had held over the lives of blind people as they were no longer seen as the singular authority on blindness.

Eventually it became impossible to continue the campaign against Braille. Once blind people learnt Braille they taught it to other blind people they knew, and it rapidly spread throughout the blind community in France. A year after Louis Braille died, Braille was adopted as the official system used by blind people to read and write in France. Dufau, who had opposed Braille with such force, was by that time a proponent of the system. It is hard to believe that he experienced a true change of heart, and evidence suggests that his assistant convinced him that it would reflect better on him if he supported the system and a student of the school became famous, than if he was overthrown by blind students and teachers. Despite the success of French blind people in getting Braille officially adopted, the fight for Braille continued across the globe.

In Britain, schools for the blind typically concerned themselves with teaching blind people a trade, rather than providing them with a comprehensive education. In some ways they were comparable to work houses, dressed up as schools. A group of blind people worked to demonstrate that Braille was the most effective written communication system for blind people. Thomas Rhodes Armitage, blind himself, worked with a group of blind people to test communication systems and determine which system functioned best. In 1870 they decided that Braille was the superior system for blind people.

In the United States a number of systems had been developed for blind people. As the country was so big and resources limited, different schools used different systems and as new ones were created, blind people were expected to learn them. There was no consistency, and so publishers, schools, and blind people met to determine which code should be adopted. Eventually Braille was adopted in part because of its ease, but also because it enabled the reading and writing of print conventions, such as capital letters and punctuation.

These days the argument for and against Braille continues in several arenas. Blind people are divided in regards to its usefulness, schools debate whether it is worth recruiting qualified teachers, and governments fail to set aside funding to either train those teachers or fund their employment in local authorities. ‘Has technology replaced Braille?’ is a question I hear thrown around by the media more often than I should, usually accompanied by an article about a technology that will revolutionise how blind people read, rendering Braille unnecessary. It has not failed to escape me that whilst I’ve seen countless such articles, Braille is still firmly in place as the writing system used by blind people globally.

The question of technology is one that merits a discussion, though not whether Braille should be replaced with an alternative system. Can we justify teaching a blind person Braille when there is such little money to spend on the education of blind children, and we know that blind people will require computing skills, as we all do, if they are to be successful in education, employment, and in life in general? Surely the best decision is to teach them how to use a computer, as by doing so they can email sighted and blind people alike. They can read eBooks, use a screen reader to navigate the web, and type their essays. It’s a question that arises not from a hatred of Braille, but from a desperate lack of funding and a struggle to give blind people the best possible education.

Is the answer to set Braille aside, or to fight for increased funding? Funding not only for qualified teachers, but for investment in low-cost Braille technologies that allow blind people to use Braille in conjunction with the computer. Rather than viewing this as an either or, I argue that we can have both, if it is funded appropriately and organised sensibly. We cannot separate Braille and technology and have done with it. There are blind people for whom Braille is the only way they are able to access their place of work, refusing to teach blind people Braille would shut them out from seeking such jobs in future. Furthermore, it ignores the existence of deafblind people who may use Braille as their primary communication method. Without Braille, some deafblind people would be unable to access the computer at all.

We must continue the fight for literacy and inclusion, not only in the classroom, but by bringing it to our governments. Rather than forcing us to choose between the meagre resources we can afford, they must invest in the education of blind people so that we can truly be equal to sighted people as we should be. Braille may be the topic over which we fight due to the limited funds provided by the government, but the true question is whether blind people deserve to be educated to the same standard as sighted people.

When I think about the inherently political nature of Braille, both in its creation and today, I am reminded of this quote by Louis Braille himself.

Access to communication in the widest sense is access to knowledge, and that is vitally important for us if we are not to go on being despised or patronized by condescending sighted people. We do not need pity, nor do we need to be reminded that we are vulnerable. We must be treated as equals — and communication is the way we can bring this about.

Though we are separated by centuries and the world I inhabit would be unrecognisable to him, our struggle to be valued as equals is much the same.

Further Reading

• Notes from the Braille Literacy Crisis
• Invention of Braille
• A History of Braille