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Born on January 4, 1809, Coupvray, France, Braille was accidentally blinded in one eye at the age of three. Within two years, a disease in his other eye left him completely blind.

Captain Charles Barbier invented sonography, or nightwriting, a system of embossed symbols used by soldiers to communicate silently at night on the battlefield. Inspired by a lecture Barbier gave at the Institute a few years later, the fifteen-year-old Braille adapted Barbier's system to replace Haüy's awkward embossed type, which he and his classmates had been obliged to learn.

In his initial study, Braille had experimented with geometric shapes cut from leather as well as with nails and tacks hammered into boards. He finally settled on a fingertip-sized six-dot code, based on the twenty-five letters of the alphabet, which could be recognized with a single contact of one digit. By varying the number and placement of dots, he coded letters, punctuation, numbers, diphthongs, familiar words, scientific symbols, mathematical and musical notation, and capitalization. With the right hand, the reader touched individual dots and, with the left, moved on toward the next line, comprehending as smoothly and rapidly as sighted readers. Using the Braille system, students were also able to take notes and write themes by punching dots into paper with a pointed stylus which was aligned with a metal guide.

It was invented by Louis Braille (1809-1852), a French teacher of the blind. It consists of patterns of raised dots arranged in cells of up to six dots in a 3 x 2 configuration.

Each cell represents a letter, numeral or punctuation mark.

Grade 3, which is used only in personal letters, diaries, and notes. It is a kind of shorthand, with entire words shortened to a few letters.

The Moon alphabet is easier to learn than Braille, particularly for people who lose their sight in later life. The letters of the Moon alphabet can represent individual sounds, parts of words, whole words or numbers.