Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: Braille signage is not an uncommon sight in Japan, and can be found in public spaces such as train station ticket machines, the buttons inside a lift or elevator, and the various functions provided by the electronic panels in public toilets.While travelling in Japan,Blind American vlogger Molly Burke was delighted by the sheer volume of braille signage, but, as braille is not an 'international language', the raised dots found on such signs unfortunately remained undecipherable.As many people know, braille is a system of reading by touch developed by Louis Braille in 1825, when he was just 16 years old.Blinded in one eye at three years old by an accident, an infection soon spread to his other eye leaving him completely blind by the time he was five.At the Royal School for the Blind in Paris, Louis was frustrated with the established system of reading by touch, which involved raised letters which had to be traced one by one with the finger, a process that was time-consuming to read, and did not allow blind people to write.During this time, the military general Charles Barbier visited the school to introduce his system of 'night reading', which involved raised dots that could be pressed into paper from behind, and read with the fingers to allow messages to be exchanged without the need for light, and therefore not attracting enemy fire. Louis saw potential in this method, although Barbier's system was complex and involved eight to twelve dots per sound or letter.Over a number of years, Louis refined this system into the familiar six dot braille cell that is used by so many languages around the world today.The first person to introduce braille to Japan was Sei'ichi Tejima, who visited America in 1876 and purchased a book on the merits of braille which he took back to Japan and
DOI: 10.69200/0002033793
Author: Kunert, Hannah Rose
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7143779080