Berthoud Community Library District

Louis Braille was just five years old when he lost his sight. He was a clever boy, determined to live like everyone else, and what he wanted more than anything was to be able to read. Even at the school for the blind in Paris, there were no books for him. And so he invented his own alphabet a whole new system for writing that could be read by touch. A system so ingenious that it is still used by the blind community today.

Tells the life story of the nineteenth-century Frenchman who lost his sight at the age of three and created a reading system for the blind at fifteen.

Louis Braille certainly wasn't your average teenager. Blind from the age of four, he was only fifteen when in 1824 he invented a reading system that converted printed words into columns of raised dots. Through touch, Braille opened the world of books to the sightless, and almost two hundred years later, no one has ever improved upon his simple, brilliant idea.