The Other Side of the Page

Charles Barbier had to ask more than once. In March 1833 he wrote to Alexandre-René Pignier, director of the Royal Institution for Blind Youth in Paris, requesting a copy of the changes someone had made to his writing method. He would pay for it once he knew the price.

The book had been published four years earlier. Its author, Louis Braille, was now twenty-four, a former pupil teaching at the institution. He had developed a smaller, more versatile arrangement of raised dots from Barbier's work. The first pages gave Barbier credit, while explaining why his method needed changing.

Barbier had supplied the tools for a different arrangement. His raised-point writing reached the school in 1821, while Braille was a pupil. Paper, a grooved board, a guide and a point could turn the writer's own marks into something a finger could recover. Barbier donated sets of the equipment. The pupils could write notes and give them to one another.

A smaller sign

Barbier's method encoded coordinates. A letter or sound occupied a position in a table; two columns of dots identified its row and column. The reader had to distinguish the counts in a relatively tall sign. Barbier preferred a phonetic version, recording French sounds, but the pupils used an alphabetic version with conventional spelling.

This was a much more flexible beginning than the familiar story of a discarded military code. Barbier had served in the artillery before the French Revolution. His inkless writing experiments included a method of cutting paper, advertised in 1809 for officers and travellers. His 1815 proposal for raised points, however, explicitly addressed blind readers. The battlefield scene in which soldiers need secret orders in the dark belongs to later retellings. The period name “night-writing” helped the two histories become entangled.

Braille wanted signs that took less space and offered a wider vocabulary. In the preface to his 1829 book he stated the practical comparison: two of his signs occupied the space of one of Barbier's. His repertoire could represent accented letters, punctuation, numbers and algebraic signs, as well as ordinary letters.

The compact cell had two columns with three possible dot positions in each. Its pattern could be learnt as a character, rather than as a pair of counts locating something in a table. The upper four positions supplied ten basic forms. Adding a dot at the lower left, or dots at both lower positions, generated further series. A small set of shapes could be extended systematically.

Writing on the back

The board and guide made that geometry available to a hand. Paper went between them. Each rectangular opening in the guide admitted one character; beneath it lay the board's horizontal grooves. The edges of the rectangle and the grooves located the point, giving three positions down one side and three down the other.

Pressing the paper down produced a bump on its other face. This meant that the writing moved in the opposite direction to the reading. To obtain a line read from left to right, the writer began at the far right and worked leftwards. Each character also had to be reversed. The raised dots appeared in their reading positions when the sheet was turned over.

Braille explained this in both editions of his manual. Reading and writing demanded two distinct habits. His instructions were exact about where to begin: the rightmost rectangle, then the one to its left. In the earlier arrangement, the writer shifted the paper after completing a line. By 1837, he also described larger grooved boards that held an entire page still while the guide moved down through successive pairs of holes in the frame.

The letter a has one dot at the upper left when read. For b, a second dot sits below it. For k, the added dot occupies the bottom-left position instead.

From the back of the paper, those left-hand positions are on the writer's right. The writing direction and the character both reverse.

Paper needed to be fairly strong, Braille advised. The apparatus changed too: metal plates offered an alternative to wooden boards that could warp. The code's regularity depended on a usable surface, a guide that kept its place and relief that remained recognisable after the paper left the frame.

A closer look · 7:35 · English · English captions

Writing the other way round

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The method could be used at a table far from a printing shop. In September 1946, Russell Lee photographed Lucy Sergent writing in Lejunior, Kentucky. She was twenty-six and had spent eleven years at the Kentucky State School for the Blind, graduating from high school there. Her frame and point belonged to a later generation of equipment, using the same principle of guided marks made from the back of a sheet.

The line that lost its shape

The title of Braille's first manual named words, music and plainsong together. Music was part of the design problem from the outset. Braille played the piano, cello and organ; a useful written system needed to do more than approximate the sounds of speech.

His 1829 notation still contained horizontal strokes alongside dots. In the supplement, he explained why the musical system needed rebuilding. It occupied too much space, and the raised stroke did not retain a durable relief: it could be confused with two partly flattened dots. The difference between signs had to survive in paper, rather than merely look clear in an explanation.

The replacement reused the shapes of the letters d to j for the seven musical notes. Other signs supplied the octave, while changes in the cell indicated note values. Musical context allowed some signs to do more than one job. In his 1837 manual, Braille explained how the same rhythmic form could represent different durations, with the measure resolving the meaning; additional indicators could clarify difficult cases.

By then he was publishing a revised, corrected and enlarged edition. Its preface credited long practice and the help of other accomplished blind people for useful observations and applications. The book offered reading exercises in six languages and examples for voice and instruments. Its printed standard had grown out of use among people who could judge the signs with their own fingers.

Support at the school remained uneven. Pignier had encouraged the system, but Pierre-Armand Dufau restricted it after replacing him as director in 1840. Deputy director Joseph Guadet helped secure its restoration to official use in 1844.

A correspondent learning the code

That useful medium still required people to learn it. Communicating with an untrained sighted correspondent presented a different problem. With a pupil named Binet, Braille worked on a printing plate intended to let sighted people produce tactile letters without first mastering the dot alphabet. Later, his Decapoint formed ordinary visible letters from dots. Another blind inventor, Pierre-François-Victor Foucault, mechanised this approach with a ten-key raphigraph and carbon paper.

Barbier's response to the book in 1833 preserved both appreciation and disagreement. He praised Braille's work but regretted that the younger man had adopted a different ordering of the signs. He thought retaining his arrangement would have increased the usefulness of his own method.

He would have liked to send his thanks using Braille's system. First, he wrote, he would need time to acquire the practical habit.