The Braille System - IELTS Reading Answers & Explanations

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 28-40, which are based on Reading Passage 3 below.

The Braille System

A

About 200 years ago, a curious three-year-old boy playing in his father’s shop had an accident that ended up changing the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. The little boy was Louis Braille, and his father was a harness maker in Coupvray, France, a small town near Paris. Louis poked his eye with one of the sharp tools on his father’s workbench. The injury and the ensuing infection, which spread through both eyes, caused him to lose his vision. Only a dozen years later, at the age of fifteen, Braille developed a system of raised dots on paper that made it possible for blind people to read and write. While he was not the first person to toy with the idea of tactile reading—that is, reading by feeling shapes on a flat surface—his system surpassed others thanks to its simplicity, ease of use, and adaptability.

B

During the first few years after his accident, Braille attended a local school with sighted children, where he learned by the only means available to him—listening and memorizing. He was a gifted student and at the age of ten earned a scholarship to attend the Royal Institution for Blind Youth in Paris. He later became a teacher at the Institution and remained there until his death in 1852 at the age of forty-three. The Institution relied largely on oral instruction, but pupils had access to a few books specially designed for blind students by Valentin Haüy, the school’s founder. Haüy had developed a method for pressing shapes of letters onto wet paper and then letting them dry, providing pages with raised characters that students could “read” by running their fingertips across the thick paper. The books were big and cumbersome and took a long time to produce—and to read. In addition, they addressed only part of the blind students’ communication dilemma—the ability to read. For full literacy, students also needed to be able to write.

C

A man named Charles Barbier, who had invented a system known as night writing for soldiers to send messages in the dark, provided the inspiration Braille needed for his reading method. Barbier visited the Royal Institution for Blind Youth in 1821 to demonstrate his technique, which used rectangular cells with raised dots. The cells, thirty-six in all, represented sounds rather than individual letters of the alphabet and consisted of a template of twelve dots in six rows of two. Braille saw the system’s benefits right away and then zeroed in on its drawbacks. He thought it should be based on the alphabet—the way sighted people read—and not on phonetics. It also needed a way to designate punctuation marks, accents, numbers, and other symbols; and, for the user to be able to read with ease, a cell had to be small enough to fit beneath one’s fingertip.

D

For the next three years, Braille fine-tuned his system and in 1824 came up with a version that worked to his satisfaction: a six-dot cell (three rows of two) that allowed for sixty-three possible combinations of dots, enough for all twenty-six letters of the Roman alphabet plus accents, capital letters, punctuation marks, and numbers. For example, a cell with one dot at the top left (position one) represents the letter a, whereas a cell with one dot at the bottom right (position six) means the next symbol is a capital letter. The numbers zero to nine are coded the same as the letters a to j, except they are preceded by a cell with dots in positions three through six (bottom left dot and all three dots in the right column). Users could read an individual cell with a single touch of the fingertip, and they scanned dots from left to right as in normal reading. What’s more, the Braille system made it possible to write by punching dots into paper (from right to left because the reverse side is read).

E

Originally, Braille symbols were written with a slate and stylus—the equivalent of paper-and-pencil writing, using the slate to hold the paper and the stylus to prick holes in it. In 1892, a Braille writing machine was invented; used like a typewriter, it has six keys and a space bar. Today, writing Braille is no more difficult or time-consuming than producing a printed document. You need only to hook up a standard computer to a machine that will emboss the text in Braille. Braille’s fellow students quickly learned his system; for the first time, they could take notes in class and write papers, not to mention pass notes back and forth to one another. Yet the system was not widely used in Braille’s lifetime. It did not become the official communication system for blind people in France until 1854, two years after he died.

F

The system remains in use today, only slightly altered from the original version. It has incorporated symbols for math, science, and music and has been adapted to dozens of languages, including many with non-Roman alphabets, such as Chinese and Japanese. Braille symbols often show up in public places, such as on elevator buttons, and their helpfulness in labeling household items like canned goods is undisputed. Nevertheless, knowledge of Braille has declined in recent years as technology has provided innovations, such as recorded books and computers with synthetic speech, that make it less necessary to read the old-fashioned way. Many now deem Braille an obsolete system, but its devotees still consider it a form of literacy as basic as the three R’s.