Braille

WHY IN NEWS?

All India Radio News and its regional units in Pune and Nagpur have observed World Braille Day in an innovative way by broadcasting news read by Visually impaired students and officers.

ABOUT BRAILLE

• Braille is a tactile writing system used by people who are visually impaired.
• It is traditionally written with embossed paper. Braille users can read computer screens and other electronic supports using refreshable braille displays.
• Braille is named after its creator, Louis Braille, a Frenchman who lost his sight as a result of a childhood accident.
• Braille is not a language. Rather, it is a code by which many languages—such as English, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, and dozens of others—may be written and read.

BRAILLE CELL

• The characters have rectangular blocks called cells that have tiny bumps called raised dots. The number and arrangement of these dots distinguish one character from another.
• Braille cells are not the only thing to appear in braille text.
• There may be embossed illustrations and graphs, with the lines either solid or made of series of dots, arrows, bullets that are larger than braille dots, etc.

A full braille cell includes six raised dots arranged in two columns, each column having three dots. The dot positions are identified by numbers from one to six. There are 64 possible combinations, including no dots at all for a word space.