World Braille Day January 2026
- Grace Aspinall
- 3 days ago
- 3 min read
The United Nations General Assembly, in November 2018, established January 4 as Braille Day. The observance of Braille Day, on its inventor, Louis Braille’s birthday, January 4, 1809, intends to raise awareness of the significance of Braille. Braille consists of raised dots that allow vision-impaired and
blind people to read via the touch of their fingertips, providing a valuable tool to expand the world to the visually compromised.
Louis Braille became blind as a child and encountered Charles Barbier’s “night writing,” a 12-dot system invented for soldiers to communicate in darkness. Louis found the system difficult, and thus he created the six-dot system we now know as Braille. Louis was only 15 years old at the time of his creation.
Braille is not a language; rather, it is a form of communication where the person feels the set of dots. For example, including the first of the six dots states the letter a. Both dot number 1 and 2 mean the letter b. Braille includes letters, punctuation marks, numbers, and sometimes entire words by using a series of six dots arranged in a 2 x 3 grid. The full Braille cell has the six dots arranged in two parallel rows of three dots each. This arrangement can create sixty-four combinations. Capital letters have the Braille dot “6,” the last dot on the right, before the letter to be capitalized.
People “read” Braille by using their fingertips to touch the raised dots to determine the meaning. Eventually, the reader can move and “read” very quickly. A type of shorthand also exists in Braille called “contracted, “which uses less space and reduces the dots from a full written word to one or two letters. An example would be the word “you,” which would be reduced to “y,” and the word “him” would be “hm.” There are 75 words created in short form to save the amount of paper required for a Braille book.
Several methods exist for creating Braille documents. The slate and stylus are the equivalent of pen and paper. The paper is held in place by the slate, which has evenly spaced depressions, and the stylus pushes each dot required for each letter. This process eventually creates Braille words and letters or documents, but it is time-consuming. The best use of the slate and stylus would be to create short notes or label a file folder or something similar. The braillewriter vaguely resembles a typewriter, but there are only six keys along with a space bar, a line spacer, and a backspace. The keys insert the dots on a page, and Braille letters containing more than one dot can be created by pushing several keys at a time.
From Braille’s beginning in the 1820s, it has provided a crucial tool for independence and access to information for people with visual impairments. Since then, technology has advanced through software development and portable electronic devices to further enhance the creation of a variety of Braille
documents. These programs usually can repeat back what was created in Braille. All of the abilities of written programs on computers are also available to users of the appropriate Braille hardware and software. Users are allowed to edit their work, which teaches the user not only the Braille letters but also the correct spelling of their words.
Louis Braille’s brilliant creation should be celebrated not just on Braille Day, but throughout the year. These six dots opened the world through writing for all who are visually impaired, and the production of Braille documents of all different languages and subjects is valuable.
Celebrating Braille Day could include the exploration of a Braille document. Support of organizations designed to assist users of Braille for whatever reason would certainly be welcomed and thus could raise awareness of how Braille serves everyone in one way or another.
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I am an enthusiastic woman who has been a freelance journalist, photojournalist, and photographer for many years and a Her Nexx Chapter blogger since 2018. Recently I am also serving as the HNC Editorial Project Director. As an accomplished equestrian with my horse Sonny Madison who has owned me since 2001, I also love my wonderful beagles, Lois Lane and Lana Lang; my awesome terrific children and grandchildren; and reading, writing, painting, drawing, photography, and traveling. A native of Williamstown, Massachusetts with a bachelor’s degree in English from Skidmore College and a master’s degree in Organizational Development – Corporate Communications from Norwich University, I now live in the metro Washington, DC area with my husband, where I display my talents for technical writing and other corporate/government duties.
