Publications Archive

Reading by Touch

Editor: Herbert Spencer

Publisher: Lund Humphries, London

© R.N.I.B.

Leaflet reprinted from Typographica 6, December 1962

If in this country today there is a single reason for the high proportion of blind people who lead useful, well-integrated lives, it must surely be the general adoption, not a century ago, of the braille system of embossed writing. Braille, however, was not the first method of reading by touch. The desire of the blind to gain access to the written word led to many experiments in a variety of media, and even after Braille’s invention other systems of embossed symbols were formulated and used.

Early systems of touch reading

It is recorded that a distinguished blind Arab professor, Zain-Din al Amidi, of the University of Moustansiryeh, in what is now Iraq, in the fourteenth century improvised a method by which he identified his books and made notes. Although blind soon after birth, he led a studious life, interesting himself particularly in jurisprudence and foreign languages. In 1517 one Francisco Lucas of Saragossa contrived a set of letters carved on thin tablets of wood, which was brought to Italy about 1575 and improved by Rampansetto of Rome, who used larger blocks, engraving the letters instead of embossing them. Both systems failed because the letters were too difficult to read. In 1547 an Italian physician, Girolamo Cardano, suggested a method of teaching the blind to read which in some ways resembled the work of Louis Braille. In 1640 Pierre Morean, a Paris notary, cast a movable lead type, but abandoned his invention because of lack of means. At the same time, letters made of tin were used by Schönberger, of Königsberg. In 1651 George Harsdorffer, a Nuremburg poet, revived the classical method of a wax-coated tablet in which letters could be cut with a stylus. In 1676 an Italian Jesuit, Francesco Terzi, devised a kind of cipher code based on a system of dots enclosed in squares and other shapes. He also advocated a type of string alphabet, a system said to have originated in various parts of South America. Its adoption in this country is credited to two blind Edinburgh men, Robert Milne and David McBeath. Seven main knots, of varying construction, were used to represent certain letters, and the remaining letters of the alphabet used these knots in combination with a smaller knot set at a varying distance from the main knot. A string alphabet was used for many years at the Glasgow Asylum for the Blind, and passages from the Bible were translated into this medium, the string being drawn from a reel by the reader. This system was also used by blind people to correspond with each other and with their sighted friends.

The French encyclopedist, Diderot, tells of a blind woman born in 1741 who had been taught to read from letters cut out of paper. A Viennese musician, Maria Theresa von Paradis, born in 1759 and blind from early childhood, learned to read by means of pins stuck into a cushion in the shape of letters. She subsequently was able to read a system of letters pricked through cardboard, invented by a blind man called Weissenberg of Mannheim, and even had a press invented for her by von Kempellen with which she printed German characters in relief.

Haüy

The great pioneer, however, in the education of the blind was the Frenchman Valentin Haüy who founded at Paris in 1784 the first of all schools for the blind. His main concern, of course, was to discover a way of teaching his pupils to read. Maria von Paradis herself visited Paris and explained Weissenberg’s system to Haüy. But Haüy conceived the idea that the blind could be taught to read by means of ordinary large type printed in relief. Although Haüy was not the first to discover the art of embossed printing, he was the first to use it in the production of books for the blind. For more than forty years, the pupils of the school founded by Haüy acquired their education from his large, relief-printed folios, a very slow and cumbersome process. Writing, of course, was even more cumbersome, for the only way in which the pupils could express themselves was by setting up letters in type. In 1786 Haüy published his “Essai sur l’Education des Aveugles”, which described his aims and methods, and an English translation of this was published by Thomas Blacklock, the blind Scottish poet, in 1793. Haüy used the italic form of the roman letter in two sizes of type, the larger for beginners and the smaller for experienced readers. The pages were printed on one side only, and were pasted back to back before binding. He developed several abbreviations and contractions to reduce the size of his books.

The genesis of braille

In 1821 Haüy ‘s school, the Institution Nationale des Jeunes Aveugles, was visited by an ex-captain of artillery, Charles Barbier, who in 1819 had invented a system of writing by dots based on phonetic principles: this he had evolved from a form of what he called “night writing”, which he claimed would enable soldiers in the field to communicate with each other during darkness. Barbier’s system, though too intricate for general use, interested some of the pupils of the Institution Nationale because it could be read more rapidly than Haüy’s embossed roman letter and, more important, it could be written by means of a stylus and a metal flame devised by Barbier. But it was not satisfactory, and its importance lies in the fact that it provided the idea on which Braille based his own system.

Meantime, experiments continued .in other countries. A type of roman capital formed of raised dots and dashes was invented by Koechlin of Stuttgart. Klein in Vienna produced a vertical arrangement of five embossed points.

The first embossed books for the blind to be used in this country were some of Haüy’s works imported in 1821 by Lady Elizabeth Lowther for her blind son, later to become Sir Charles Lowther, who in 1832 obtained type from Paris and embossed parts of the Bible for his own use.

Gall’s type

Haüy’s books in 1826 so impressed James Gall, an Edinburgh printer and publisher, that he immediately started to experiment on his own account. In 1827 he published his “First Book for Teaching the Art of Reading to the Blind”, partly in inkprint and partly in his own embossed type. This was followed by other books. His alphabet was an angular modification of roman capitals, first engraved in wood and later cast in metal. He subsequently realised that dots were more easily deciphered by the fingers than unbroken lines and so developed a form a serrated type. He published, without financial help, several embossed books for the British and Foreign Bible Society, the London Sunday School Union, and the Religious Tract Society.

Fry and Alston

In 1832, the Edinburgh Society of Arts offered a gold medal for the best method of printing for the blind. No fewer than nineteen systems were submitted, sixteen of them using arbitrary symbols. The medal was ultimately awarded to Dr Edmund Fry, of London, for a plain roman letter which, slightly modified later, became very popular in this country and America. Fry’s type was adopted, with some modification, by John Alston, of the Glasgow Asylum for the Blind, who established a printing press, and published, inter alia, first the New Testament and then, in 1840, the complete Bible, in nineteen volumes, the first embossed Bible of any type. The books he published sold widely, here and in America. His types were cut in very sharp, thin faces in two sizes, Great Primer for ordinary use and Double Pica for learners and older readers whose fingers were insufficiently sensitive to cope with the smaller type.

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A page from Alston’s Bible published in Glasgow in 1840. A passage from the prophet Isaiah in embossed Roman letters

Boston Line Letter

During Alston’s time, the pioneer of embossed printing in the United States, Dr Samuel Howe, the first director of the Perkins Institution in Boston, toured Europe inspecting all the methods of embossed printing he could find, and finally decided on a variation of the Alston system consisting of small angular letters without capitals. This became known as Boston Line Letter and, with the later addition of capitals, was widely used in the United States.

The very prolixity of these systems based on the roman alphabet shows that none was satisfactory: all in fact were very difficult to master.

Shorthand systems

Systems based on shorthand were also tried, notably those of Lucas and Frere. Lucas, a shorthand writer of Bristol, used straight and hooked lines, curves and dots, the meanings of many signs, as in shorthand, being dependent on their position on the line. Books printed in this system were widely used, both in this country and abroad, and a musical notation was developed from it. Frere, a Londoner who was himself blind, invented a system based on phonetic principles, the characters of which consisted of straight and hooked fines, angles and half circles, as well as hollow and solid circles. To speed reading, he bracketed two lines of type together, the second line of each bracket being reversed and read from right to left. No punctuation marks were used.

Frere was also responsible for a method of printing his books, and this was used by others: copper characters were placed on a tin plate coated with zinc solution, and heat was applied to the bottom of the plate, resulting in the fusion of the characters to the plate and a consequent very sharp imprint. The difficulties of learning both the shorthand systems, however, were just as great as in the earlier “line” systems, although the books produced thereby were cheaper and less bulky.

Moon

The only line system now surviving, indeed flourishing, was that invented in 1847 by Dr William Moon, of Brighton. Moon, after a partially-sighted childhood, became blind at the age of 21 and soon mastered all the systems of embossed writing available to him: he found from experience that very few blind people were capable of using them satisfactorily and decided to produce a system of his own. This retained many roman letters in simplified form, the remaining letters being based on Frere’s linear characters, without signifying the same letters. His alphabet consisted of only nine characters, their signification being determined by which way up they were used. He also, like Frere, bracketed his lines for ease of reading but, unlike Frere’s return line, the letters in his were not reversed. He also reduced contractions to a minimum.

Moon’s alphabet

He had early resolved to make the welfare of the blind his life’s work, being deeply religious and a man of simple evangelical faith. At first he earned his living by teaching blind pupils to read, using Frere’s system. He had married young, and his wife kept a shop to augment his earnings from teaching, five shillings a week at first. He records that soon after the birth of his second child “my landlord came and told me that he must raise my rent 6d. per week. I told him I would lay it before the Lord, beseeching Him to aid me in these trying circumstances. The following week, before the additional rent became due, an extra half-crown was added to my salary, which made ten shillings a week.” He soon found that most of his pupils were unable to decipher the characters or to memorize a series of contractions, and so began to devise his own system. By this, he wrote in his diary, “a lad who had in vain for five years endeavoured to learn to read by the other systems could in ten days read easy sentences”. In 1847 he issued his first booklet, printed on a wooden hand press in his house, and soon after began to undertake the printing of parts of the Bible. This led him to evolve a stereotyped plate from which copies could be printed whenever required: a plate of tinned sheet iron on which the characters of tinned copper wire, cut and shaped by special tools, were fixed. The first wooden press was eventually replaced by an iron Albion. The strong evangelical tenor of Moon’s life led to much work for missionary societies, the Moon system being adapted to other languages. By 1880 the alphabets of 194 foreign languages were available for the use of missionaries, although now Moon is largely confined to this country. Between 1847 and 1880 he stereotyped 30,000 plates and produced nearly 125,000 volumes.

From 1923, Moon has been printed direct from type. Several of the types are square-bodied, so that four characters can be produced, depending upon which way up the type is used, from one piece of type; others, on square or narrower bodies, make two characters; and some only one. Fourteen types are required to make the alphabet, and twelve other types are used for contractions and punctuation marks. There are six sizes of space, which are higher than those used for inkprint, since they must be as high as the shoulder of the type on which the letter is cast to ensure perfect embossing. The type is set by hand directly into the chase, and between each line a thin brass rule is used. There are about 900 letters and spaces in a Moon page measuring 12 by 10 in., and these can be set by an experienced typesetter in half an hour. The forme weighs 50 lb. The paper is moistened before printing to take the embossing without splitting, and after printing the pages pass through a mechanical gas-heated drier.

What became the Moon Society has since 1914 been managed by the (now) Royal National Institute for the Blind, and provides a useful and complementary service to braille publishing, offering a clear, bold type for older people whose touch is not good enough for reading braille.

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Collating pages of Moon before binding

Braille

It was Louis Braille who made the great breakthrough. In his time there were in existence over twenty different systems of embossed type, most of which had been invented by those who could see, and none of which proved as easy to the touch as to the sight. Limited in value though these systems were for reading, perhaps their most important drawback was their virtual uselessness in providing a means whereby the blind could themselves write: the education of the blind in literature and music had to be largely oral. In other words, two- way literary communication was impossible for blind people. The beauty of Braille’s system was its simplicity, and its major advantage over everything that had gone before was that it could be simply and easily written by the blind. It was a practical script, invented and perfected by a blind man.

Louis Braille was born near Paris in 1809, the son of a cobbler, and lost his sight in early childhood as a result of an accident with one of his father’s tools. He later entered Haüy’s school and learnt to read Haüy’s alphabet. He proved to be a first-class student, and subsequently joined the staff of the school. He studied Barbier’s system, looking for a means whereby it could be adapted for both reading and writing and also for musical notation (he himself was a good musician and played the organ at several Paris churches). By 1825, at the age of 16, his system was more or less complete. The results of his experiments he summarized in a pamphlet issued in 1829. These results did not wholly satisfy him, however, and he worked on them for a number of years until in 1834 he produced an improved version of his scheme. This was more compact than any system which preceded or followed it.

The English braille alphabet (contractions not shown)

[The original publication contained the same also as an embossed sheet]

Braille consists of sixty-three symbols, out of a possible sixty-four variations of the dots of a domino six (the sixty-fourth being the blank). These dots are, for purposes of description, numbered 1 - 2 - 3 downwards in the left hand column and 4 - 5 - 6 down- wards in the right hand column. Letter A is dot 1, B dots 1 and 2, C dots 1 and 4, and so on. The first ten letters are formed from the top four dots, the second ten consist of the first ten repeated with the addition of dot 3, and a similar symmetry continues the division of the sixty-three symbols until seven groups of symbols are formed. In English braille the alphabet takes twenty-six of the characters, punctuation ten, and the remaining twenty-seven are used to meet the special needs of individual languages or for contractions. Numbers are represented by the first ten letters preceded by a numeral sign. In a number of languages there are two grades of braille, Grade 1, in which every word is fully spelt, letter by letter, and Grade 2 (the everyday form), in which various contractions are used to express prefixes, suffixes, pronouns, conjunctions, prepositions, and other frequently recurring groups of letters and words, the main purpose of these being the reduction of bulk. A few languages have a Grade 3, highly abridged, which comes close to shorthand, but Grade 3 is too complex for all but a small minority of readers who have a good command of language and a good memory. Sensitivity of touch, of course, governs the extent to which braille is used: those educated in schools for the blind use braille far more naturally and easily than those who lose their sight in adult life and are almost invariably slow readers. The older people are, the more difficult it is for them to acquire the sensitivity of touch necessary for ease of reading. Commercial braille shorthands are widely used, for shorthand-typing is one of the more established occupations for the blind. From the beginning, braille has been used for musical notation. It is also applied to the expression of scientific and mathematical symbols and formulae, the marking of instruments and equipment (watches, thermometers, gauges, playing cards, etc.) and to the outlining of maps and diagrams.

Despite its manifest advantages, the chief of which were its adaptability for writing and for rapid reading, its ability to express music as well as words, and its simplicity, Braille’s system was slow to be adopted, especially outside France.

Braille in the United Kingdom

Dr Thomas Rhodes Armitage, an able blind man, who is generally held to have introduced braille to this country, expressed in his book “The Education and Employment of the Blind”, written in 1886, the following view of the bitter controversies which had been waged over types for the blind as late as the 1860s and 1870s:

“The two main causes of this lamentable state of things seem to be that inventors of systems and managers of institutions generally had their sight and, misled by this sense, they could not understand or enter into the real wants of the blind. It is a curious and instructive fact that the two systems which are now most in favour with the blind themselves, and which have most vitality in them, are due to two blind men, Mr. Braille and Dr. Moon... Among the more intelligent of the blind the opinion has long been gaining ground that for any good results to be obtained, the question must not be settled for the blind, but by the blind themselves... The relative merits of the various methods of education through the sense of touch should be decided by those and those only who have to rely upon this sense.

This policy he had put into effect in 1868 when, with other intelligent and educated blind men, he had made an exhaustive study of all the available systems, and had decided that the blind would best be served by an acceptance of the braille system in toto, which he considered undoubtedly superior to all others. Armitage’s committee became the British & Foreign Blind Association, later the National Institute for the Blind, and was in its early days solely a braille publishing house. Under its leadership, braille quickly became the educational medium of the British blind.

Braille in America

In the United States, however, the adoption of the French system took longer. By some the French arrangement was adopted, by others a modified form of the French system, in which the most frequent letters were given the fewest dots, by others still a more radical change which involved making the braille domino horizontal instead of vertical. All three systems had their advantages: the first achieved uniformity with Great Britain and most European countries; the second (American Braille) economy of dots, which made writing by hand easier; the third (New York Point) reduced space and made reading speedier. The disaster was having three entirely different scripts in English, indeed, within one country: school books, Bibles and the like had to be printed in three types, at great expense, and blind people brought up on different systems could not communicate. The futility of the. situation lasted for thirty or forty years, and only in 1918, after much committee work, was unity achieved between Europe and the United States by the adoption of the original French system. But it was not until 1932 that agreement between the United Kingdom and the United States established Standard English Braille as the contracted form for everyday use throughout the English-speaking world.

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A page of conventional braille, embossed on thick manilla paper

Braille in non-European languages

After the adoption of the braille system by European countries, the first adaptations of braille to non-European languages began to appear in the 1870s. The UNESCO Report on World Braille Usage notes an Arabic braille in 1878 and a Peking braille at about the same time. Palamcottah or Askwith Braille for Tamil (South India) and Shirreff Braille for Urdu and Hindi (North India) were designed in the 1890s. Marathi Braille (Poona), Nilkantrai Braille for Marathi, Gujarati and Hindi (West India), Oriental Braille (for all oriental languages) and Shah Braille (Bengal) came into being about the turn of the century. At the same time, independent mission workers in China were creating further adaptations for Chinese. A Japanese adaptation had been made in 1887, and other languages followed rapidly—among them Sinhalese, Burmese, Korean, Persian, Armenian and Turkish. Many lesser-known tongues, too, some even without visual scripts, were adapted to braille. Most of the credit for pioneering braille in Asia, Africa, and the remote places of the earth belongs to the missionary bodies of Europe and America, the UNESCO Report emphasizes. Working in their distant outposts, they took pity on helpless blind children and, gathering them into missionary compounds, discovered almost without realizing it that they had founded pioneer schools for the blind. Adaptation of braille to the local vernaculars had to be made before systematic education could begin, and these they designed as best they could.

Uniformity

As the UNESCO Report points out, the 120 years between the publication of Braille’s system in 1829 and the request to UNESCO in 1949 to lend its services to rationalize braille usage in many parts of the world divide readily into two main phases. The first fifty years was that of the die-hard retreat of the cumbersome old forms of embossing which the blind could not write, then seventy years throughout which the original braille had to compete with many reconstructed forms of itself. The defeat of the old embossings was inevitable, and the civil war between the numerous adaptations of braille was probably equally inevitable: the divergences embodied theoretical improvements which had to be tried before their authors realized that local advantages were outweighed by wider considerations.

Part of an embossed radio circuit diagram

It is perhaps difficult for a sighted person to realize that, with the great variety of scripts used throughout the world to record the spoken word, the blind, whether their language is Chinese, or Tamil, or English, have only one script, and that is braille. In this light, therefore, it is of great importance that a high degree of uniformity in usage be adopted. To this end, the World Braille Council was established in 1951 under the auspices of UNESCO, in 1954 coming under the aegis of the World Council for the Welfare of the Blind, and in the last decade much progress has been made, and is still being made, towards achieving a standard world braille usage.

Braille printing

In Europe and America the general adoption of braille was followed by the setting up of braille printing presses and large braille libraries. These stimulated the rapid growth of education for the blind which, in turn, led to a greater demand for books. Except in Japan, practically no machine-printing of braille has until recently been done in non-European languages.

Braille books are produced in two ways, by hand-copying or by machine- printing. Hand-transcribed books are, in this country, written mainly by voluntary transcribers on braille writers. The braille writer was invented by an American, Hall, in 1893, and is a small portable machine with six keys, one for each braille dot, which serves roughly the same purpose as a typewriter. It enables braille to be written far more quickly than with a single stylus and writing frame. After the manilla sheets have been transcribed, they are proof-read, guarded, sewn into sections, and bound into covers. In the early days of braille, all embossed books had to be produced by hand, a long and laborious business—a situation comparable to that existing before the invention of movable type. Platen presses were, however, adapted to braille printing but, on the transcribing side, the British and Foreign Blind Association for many years used brass plates embossed by hand with a punch and hammer. The first edition of the Bible in English braille was produced in this way between 1877 and 1890: every single dot of the 20,000,000 on the 6,000 sheets was the work of one blind man. The advent of stereotyping (also invented by the American, Hall) which was adopted by the British and Foreign Blind Association in 1902, improved matters considerably. The transcribing machines were much larger and heavier versions of the braille writer, embossing not on manilla paper but on zinc sheets. These transcribing machines were by 1911 electrically operated, and by 1930 the National Institute for the Blind (as it then was) had acquired a high-speed rotary press for printing. While these technical developments vastly speeded up the process of braille publishing, it remained, compared with letterpress, a very slow and costly business.

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Vacuum-formed plastic map of Central London. A separate braille guide gives the meaning of the symbols and other information of general interest.

Solid dot braille

In effect, ever since Braille invented his system, there has been no substantial change in the method by which it has been printed. Traditionally, braille has been produced on stout paper by distorting the fibres of the paper to form hollow dots. This method, however, has always had two great disadvantages: the first, its great bulk compared with inkprint, and the second its lack of durability, or capacity to withstand repeated reading and handling in transit while still remaining legible. The bulk of braille, and the consequent storage problem, precludes personal braille libraries of any size, thus compelling the blind reader to rely to a far greater extent than the sighted upon lending libraries for his reading. And, of course, braille books in constant circulation are more liable to damage than inkprint books, while beginners in braille, both children and newly-blind adults, are prone to treat a book pretty severely until their fingers become practised and light of touch. Any system, therefore, which can substantially reduce the physical dimensions of books for the blind and improve their durability is vitally important.

The braille publishers in the United Kingdom, the Royal National Institute for the Blind and the Scottish Braille Press (the latter operating on a smaller scale than the RNIB and producing for the most part periodical literature), are faced with the massive task of trying to provide as best they can a service which sighted readers get from hundreds of publishing houses offering great variety and specializing, many of them, to a greater or lesser extent in certain categories of book. But however small the proportion of blind people in the whole population, and however small the proportion of braillists in the blind population, their reading requirements, educational, professional, and recreational, are as broad as those of letterpress readers. The need for expansion in braille publishing has, therefore, always been apparent, and any method of increasing the speed (and thereby the quantity) of braille production and of reducing the cost will contribute towards closing the enormous gap which exists between what is available to the sighted reader and what is available to the blind. The quest for a more permanent braille goes back at least forty years: the idea of somehow depositing dots on paper rather than of perforating paper is by no means new. But it has been only comparatively recently that technical advances, particularly in the field of plastics, have made possible the development of a practical and economic process.

After many years of trial and error, the RNIB has evolved a method of depositing and heat-sealing solid dots of plastic on to the surface of a thin but strong paper, and based on this method a complete processing plant has been designed. This is the new system of printing braille which has become widely known as “solid dot”. The bulk of solid dot braille is reduced by something like 45 per cent; the dots themselves are uncrushable and do not deteriorate with use; and the system, although more costly to install than the conventional embossing plant of similar output, is quicker and less expensive to operate.

Since 1959 an increasing number of the RNIB’s periodicals have been produced by the solid dot method, and a considerable volume of support for solid dot has led to the decision by the RNIB to adopt the process for most of its machine-printed braille (the production of hand-transcribed books, of course, is in no way affected by solid dot). With the general acceptance of solid dot braille and its employment for book production as well as for magazines, the way is clear for a further step forward by the blind, through the medium of the written word, towards equality of opportunity with the sighted.

Bibliography

T. R. Armitage. The education and employment of the blind. Harrison (London, 1886).

C. Baker. The blind. Privately printed (London, 1859).

C. T. Burt. The Moon Society: A century of achievement, 1848-1948. NIB (London, 1948).

R. S. Clark. Books and reading for the blind. Library Association (London, 1950).

J. Gall. A historical sketch of the origin and progress of literature for the blind: and practical hints and recommendations as to their education. Published by the author (Edinburgh, 1834).

R. B. Irwin. As I saw it. American Foundation for the Blind (New York, 1955).

E. C. Johnson. Tangible typography, or, how the blind read. Whitaker (London, 1853).

C. Mackenzie. World braille usage. UNESCO (Paris, 1953).

M. G. Thomas. The Royal National Institute for the Blind. RNIB (London, 1957).

H. J. Wagg and M. G. Thomas. A chronological survey of work for the blind. Pitman/NIB (London, 1932).

W. B. Wait. A review of the origin and development of embossed literature and music for touchreading, with special reference to the educational interests of the blind in the United States. Publisher unknown (New York, 1890).

W. B. Wait. The true structural basis of punctographic systems of literature and music. Bradstreet Press (New York, 1892).

P. A. Zahl. Blindness. Princeton UP (Princeton, NJ, 1950).

Content author: library@rnib.org.uk

Last updated: 20/11/2008 11:13