Blind school in Hebron. Close up of small boy reading braille

Braille is named after its creator, Louis Braille, a Frenchman who lost his sight as a result of a childhood accident. In 1824, at the age of fifteen, he developed the braille code based on the French alphabet as an improvement on night writing. He published his system, which subsequently included musical notation, in 1829. The second revision, published in 1837, was the first binary form of writing developed in the modern era. The basic braille alphabet, braille numbers, braille punctuation and special symbols characters are constructed from six dots. These braille dots are positioned like the figure six on a die, in a grid of two parallel vertical lines of three dots each. From the six dots that make up the basic grid, 64 different configurations can be created.