Continuing to meet our clients’ increasing and diverse language needs, Avantpage now offers braille translation services.
The braille system was developed in 1824 by a French teenager named Louis Braille. Louis had become blind at the age of three due to a household accident. While attending a school for the blind in France as a teenager, Braille learned of a system used by the French Army called “night writing” in which soldiers could communicate written messages at night by touch. The system used by the army was complex and used dots and dashes pressed into paper as code for sounds. Louis Braille sought a way to simplify night writing and create an accessible tactile alphabet that could be read easily by touch.
He created his system out of raised dots, pressed onto a piece of paper through the use of a pointed object. The dashes used in the army’s system were too difficult to feel consistently, so Braille decided to use dots exclusively. The number of dots and the systematic way in which they are arranged corresponded with characters in the French alphabet. The system created by Louis Braille as a teenager was not widely accepted until after his death at age 43. However, its ease of use caused braille to eventually be adopted by many different countries as a way for the blind to read and write.
Today, after two centuries, Louis Braille’s system is still in use, continuing to transform the lives of blind and visually impaired people the world over.
“Access to communication in the widest sense is access to knowledge, and that is vitally important for us if we [the blind] are not to go on being despised or patronized by condescending sighted people. We do not need pity, nor do we need to be reminded we are vulnerable. We must be treated as equals – and communication is the way this can be brought about.” – Louis Braille, 1841
Braille can be translated into many different languages using specialized braille translation software. At Avantpage, offering braille translation as one of our services fits exceptionally well into our overall mission and vision of enhancing communication and understanding through different languages and cultures. Although braille is a writing system all its own, it can also be translated into languages other than English. This enables visually impaired people from many different ethnic backgrounds to read braille materials in their native languages.
