1.
Alphabet
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An alphabet is a standard set of letters that is used to write one or more languages based upon the general principle that the letters represent phonemes of the spoken language. This is in contrast to other types of writing systems, such as syllabaries and logographies, the Proto-Canaanite script, later known as the Phoenician alphabet, is the first fully phonemic script. Thus the Phoenician alphabet is considered to be the first alphabet, the Phoenician alphabet is the ancestor of most modern alphabets, including Arabic, Greek, Latin, Cyrillic, Hebrew, and possibly Brahmic. Under a terminological distinction promoted by Peter T. Daniels, an alphabet is a script that represents both vowels and consonants as letters equally. In this narrow sense of the word the first true alphabet was the Greek alphabet, in other alphabetic scripts such as the original Phoenician, Hebrew or Arabic, letters predominantly or exclusively represent consonants, such a script is also called an abjad. A third type, called abugida or alphasyllabary, is one where vowels are shown by diacritics or modifications of consonantal letters, as in Devanagari. The Khmer alphabet is the longest, with 74 letters, there are dozens of alphabets in use today, the most popular being the Latin alphabet. Many languages use modified forms of the Latin alphabet, with additional letters formed using diacritical marks, while most alphabets have letters composed of lines, there are also exceptions such as the alphabets used in Braille. Alphabets are usually associated with an ordering of letters. This makes them useful for purposes of collation, specifically by allowing words to be sorted in alphabetical order and it also means that their letters can be used as an alternative method of numbering ordered items, in such contexts as numbered lists and number placements. The English word alphabet came into Middle English from the Late Latin word alphabetum, the Greek word was made from the first two letters, alpha and beta. The names for the Greek letters came from the first two letters of the Phoenician alphabet, aleph, which also meant ox, and bet, in the alphabet song in English, the term ABCs is used instead of the word alphabet. Knowing ones ABCs, in general, can be used as a metaphor for knowing the basics about anything, the history of the alphabet started in ancient Egypt. These glyphs were used as guides for logograms, to write grammatical inflections. Based on letter appearances and names, it is believed to be based on Egyptian hieroglyphs and this script had no characters representing vowels, although originally it probably was a syllabary, but unneeded symbols were discarded. An alphabetic cuneiform script with 30 signs including three that indicate the vowel was invented in Ugarit before the 15th century BC. This script was not used after the destruction of Ugarit, the Proto-Sinaitic script eventually developed into the Phoenician alphabet, which is conventionally called Proto-Canaanite before ca.1050 BC. The oldest text in Phoenician script is an inscription on the sarcophagus of King Ahiram and this script is the parent script of all western alphabets
2.
Louis Braille
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Louis Braille was a French educator and inventor of a system of reading and writing for use by the blind or visually impaired. His system remains known worldwide simply as braille, blinded in both eyes as a result of an early childhood accident, Braille mastered his disability while still a boy. He excelled in his education and received scholarship to Frances Royal Institute for Blind Youth, while still a student there, he began developing a system of tactile code that could allow blind people to read and write quickly and efficiently. Inspired by the cryptography of Charles Barbier, Braille constructed a new method built specifically for the needs of the blind. He presented his work to his peers for the first time in 1824, in adulthood, Braille served as a professor at the Institute and had an avocation as a musician, but he largely spent the remainder of his life refining and extending his system. It went unused by most educators for years after his death, but posterity has recognized braille as a revolutionary invention. Louis Braille was born in Coupvray, France, a town about twenty miles east of Paris. He and his three elder siblings – Monique Catherine, Louis-Simon, and Marie Céline – lived with their parents, Simon-René and Monique, Simon-René maintained a successful enterprise as a leatherer and maker of horse tack. As soon as he could walk, Braille spent time playing in his fathers workshop, at the age of three, the child was toying with some of the tools, trying to make holes in a piece of leather with an awl. Squinting closely at the surface, he pressed down hard to drive the point in, a local physician bound and patched the affected eye and even arranged for Braille to be met the next day in Paris by a surgeon, but no treatment could save the damaged organ. Due to his age, Braille did not realize at first that he had lost his sight. His parents made many efforts – quite uncommon for the era – to raise their youngest child in a normal fashion and he learned to navigate the village and country paths with canes his father hewed for him, and he grew up seemingly at peace with his disability. Brailles bright and creative mind impressed the teachers and priests. Braille studied in Coupvray until the age of ten, Braille, the last of the familys children to leave the household, departed for the school in February 1819. At that time the Royal Institute was an underfunded, ramshackle affair, the children were taught how to read by a system devised by the schools founder, Valentin Haüy. Not blind himself, Haüy was a philanthropist who devoted his life to helping the blind and he designed and manufactured a small library of books for the children using a technique of embossing heavy paper with the raised imprints of Latin letters. Readers would trace their fingers over the text, comprehending slowly, Braille was helped by the Haüy books, but he also despaired over their lack of depth, the amount of information kept in such books was necessarily small. Because the raised letters were made in a complex artisanal process using wet paper pressed against copper wire, so that the young Louis could send letters back home, Simon-René provided him with an alphabet made from bits of thick leather
3.
Braille
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Braille /ˈbreɪl/ is a tactile writing system used by people who are blind or visually impaired. It is traditionally written with embossed paper, braille-users can read computer screens and other electronic supports thanks to refreshable braille displays. They can write braille with the slate and stylus or type it on a braille writer, such as a portable braille note-taker. Braille is named after its creator, Frenchman Louis Braille, who lost his eyesight due to a childhood accident, in 1824, at the age of 15, Braille developed his code for the French alphabet as an improvement on night writing. He published his system, which included musical notation, in 1829. The second revision, published in 1837, was the first binary form of writing developed in the modern era, Braille characters are small rectangular blocks called cells that contain tiny palpable bumps called raised dots. The number and arrangement of these dots distinguish one character from another, since the various braille alphabets originated as transcription codes of printed writing systems, the mappings vary from language to language. Braille cells are not the thing to appear in braille text. There may be embossed illustrations and graphs, with the lines either solid or made of series of dots, arrows, bullets that are larger than braille dots, a full Braille cell includes six raised dots arranged in two lateral rows each having three dots. The dot positions are identified by numbers from one through six,64 solutions are possible from using one or more dots. A single cell can be used to represent a letter, number, punctuation mark. In the face of screen-reader software, braille usage has declined, in Barbiers system, sets of 12 embossed dots encoded 36 different sounds. It proved to be too difficult for soldiers to recognize by touch, in 1821 Barbier visited the Royal Institute for the Blind in Paris, where he met Louis Braille. Brailles solution was to use 6-dot cells and to assign a specific pattern to each letter of the alphabet. At first, braille was a transliteration of French orthography, but soon various abbreviations, contractions. The expanded English system, called Grade-2 Braille, was complete by 1905, for blind readers, Braille is an independent writing system, rather than a code of printed orthography. Braille is derived from the Latin alphabet, albeit indirectly, in Brailles original system, the dot patterns were assigned to letters according to their position within the alphabetic order of the French alphabet, with accented letters and w sorted at the end. The first ten letters of the alphabet, a–j, use the upper four dot positions and these stand for the ten digits 1–9 and 0 in a system parallel to Hebrew gematria and Greek isopsephy
4.
A
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A is the first letter and the first vowel in the ISO basic Latin alphabet. It is similar to the Ancient Greek letter alpha, from which it derives, the upper-case version consists of the two slanting sides of a triangle, crossed in the middle by a horizontal bar. The lower-case version can be written in two forms, the double-storey a and single-storey ɑ, the latter is commonly used in handwriting and fonts based on it, especially fonts intended to be read by children, and is also found in italic type. The earliest certain ancestor of A is aleph, the first letter of the Phoenician alphabet, in turn, the ancestor of aleph may have been a pictogram of an ox head in proto-Sinaitic script influenced by Egyptian hieroglyphs, styled as a triangular head with two horns extended. The Phoenician alphabet letter had a form that served as the base for some later forms. Its name is thought to have corresponded closely to the Hebrew or Arabic aleph, the Etruscans brought the Greek alphabet to their civilization in the Italian Peninsula and left the letter unchanged. During Roman times, there were many variant forms of the letter A, first was the monumental or lapidary style, which was used when inscribing on stone or other permanent mediums. There was also a style used for everyday or utilitarian writing. Variants also existed that were intermediate between the monumental and cursive styles, the known variants include the early semi-uncial, the uncial, and the later semi-uncial. At the end of the Roman Empire, several variants of the cursive minuscule developed through Western Europe. By the 9th century, the Caroline script, which was similar to the present-day form, was the principal form used in book-making. This form was derived through a combining of prior forms, 15th-century Italy saw the formation of the two main variants that are known today. These variants, the Italic and Roman forms, were derived from the Caroline Script version, the Italic form, also called script a, is used in most current handwriting and consists of a circle and vertical stroke. This slowly developed from the fifth-century form resembling the Greek letter tau in the hands of medieval Irish and English writers, the Roman form is used in most printed material, it consists of a small loop with an arc over it. Both derive from the majuscule form, in Greek handwriting, it was common to join the left leg and horizontal stroke into a single loop, as demonstrated by the uncial version shown. Many fonts then made the right leg vertical, in some of these, the serif that began the right leg stroke developed into an arc, resulting in the printed form, while in others it was dropped, resulting in the modern handwritten form. Italic type is used to mark emphasis or more generally to distinguish one part of a text from the rest. There are some other cases aside from italic type where script a, the double ⟨aa⟩ sequence does not occur in native English words, but is found in some words derived from foreign languages such as Aaron and aardvark
5.
R
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R is the 18th letter of the modern English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet. The original Semitic letter may have inspired by an Egyptian hieroglyph for tp. It was used for /r/ by Semites because in their language, the Lapis Satricanus inscription shows the form of the Latin alphabet around 500 BC. Here, the rounded, closing Π shape of the p, the descending stroke of the Latin letter R has fully developed by the 3rd century BC, as seen in the Tomb of the Scipios sarcophagus inscriptions of that era. From around 50 AD, the letter P would be written with its loop fully closed, the minuscule form developed through several variations on the capital form. Along with Latin minuscule writing in general, it developed ultimately from Roman cursive via the uncial script of Late Antiquity into the Carolingian minuscule of the 9th century. In handwriting, it was not to close the bottom of the loop but continue into the leg. The loop-leg stroke shortened into the simple arc used in the Carolingian minuscule, a calligraphic minuscule r, known as r rotunda, was used in the sequence or, bending the shape of the r to accommodate the bulge of the o. Later, the variant was also used where r followed other lower case letters with a rounded loop towards the right. Use of r rotunda was mostly tied to blackletter typefaces, insular script used a minuscule which retained two downward strokes, but which did not close the loop, this variant survives in the Gaelic type popular in Ireland until the mid 20th century. The name of the letter in Latin was er, following the pattern of letters representing continuants. This name is preserved in French and many other languages, in Middle English, the name of the letter changed from /ɛr/ to /ar/, following a pattern exhibited in many other words such as farm, and star. The letter R is sometimes referred to as the littera canina and this phrase has Latin origins, the Latin R was trilled to sound like a growling dog. A good example of a trilling R is the Spanish word for dog, in William Shakespeares Romeo and Juliet, such a reference is made by Juliets nurse in Act 2, scene 4, when she calls the letter R the dogs name. The reference is found in Ben Jonsons English Grammar. The letter ⟨r⟩ is the eighth most common letter in English, the letter ⟨r⟩ is used to form the ending -re, which is used in certain words such as centre in some varieties of English spelling, such as British English. Canadian English also uses the -re ending, unlike American English, ⟨r⟩ represents a rhotic consonant in many languages, as shown in the table below. Other languages may use the letter ⟨r⟩ in their alphabets to represent rhotic consonants different from the alveolar trill, in Haitian Creole, it represents a sound so weak that it is often written interchangeably with ⟨w⟩, e. g. Kweyol for Kreyol
6.
Writing system
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A writing system is any conventional method of visually representing verbal communication. While both writing and speech are useful in conveying messages, writing differs in also being a form of information storage. The processes of encoding and decoding writing systems involve shared understanding between writers and readers of the meaning behind the sets of characters that make up a script, the general attributes of writing systems can be placed into broad categories such as alphabets, syllabaries, or logographies. Any particular system can have attributes of more than one category, in the alphabetic category, there is a standard set of letters of consonants and vowels that encode based on the general principle that the letters represent speech sounds. In a syllabary, each symbol correlates to a syllable or mora, in a logography, each character represents a word, morpheme, or other semantic units. Other categories include abjads, which differ from alphabets in that vowels are not indicated, alphabets typically use a set of 20-to-35 symbols to fully express a language, whereas syllabaries can have 80-to-100, and logographies can have several hundreds of symbols. Systems will also enable the stringing together of these groupings in order to enable a full expression of the language. The reading step can be accomplished purely in the mind as an internal process, writing systems were preceded by proto-writing, which used pictograms, ideograms and other mnemonic symbols. Proto-writing lacked the ability to capture and express a range of thoughts. Soon after, writing provided a form of long distance communication. With the advent of publishing, it provided the medium for a form of mass communication. Writing systems are distinguished from other possible symbolic communication systems in that a system is always associated with at least one spoken language. In contrast, visual representations such as drawings, paintings, and non-verbal items on maps, such as contour lines, are not language-related. Some other symbols, such as numerals and the ampersand, are not directly linked to any specific language, every human community possesses language, which many regard as an innate and defining condition of humanity. However, the development of writing systems, and the process by which they have supplanted traditional oral systems of communication, have been sporadic, uneven, once established, writing systems generally change more slowly than their spoken counterparts. Thus they often preserve features and expressions which are no current in the spoken language. One of the benefits of writing systems is that they can preserve a permanent record of information expressed in a language. In the examination of individual scripts, the study of writing systems has developed along partially independent lines, thus, the terminology employed differs somewhat from field to field
7.
German Braille
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German Braille is one of the older braille alphabets. The French-based order of the letter assignments was largely settled on with the 1878 convention that decided the standard for international braille, however, the assignments for German letters beyond the 26 of the basic Latin alphabet are mostly unrelated to French values. In numerical order by decade, the letters are, The generic accent sign, there are numerous contractions and abbreviations. These can be found in the link in the reference section. Punctuation is as follows, Only the first asterisk is marked with dot 6, so print *** is in braille ⠠⠔⠔⠔. ⠴ is the Artikel sign, for the brackets of phonetic transcription, German Braille uses a modified form, ⠰⠶⠀⠰⠶. Additional punctuation and symbols, especially mathematical, are explained in the reference below. Numbers are introduced with the sign ⠼ and they are dropped to decade 5 for ordinals and for the denominator of fractions. So, for example, ⠼⠙ is ⟨4⟩, while ⠼⠲ is ⟨4. ⟩, the percent sign requires the number sign even after a number, ⠼⠃⠼⠴ ⟨2%⟩, otherwise it would look like the fraction ²⁄₀. In a compound fraction, a repeat of the number sign separate the units from the fraction, the emphasis sign is marked with an extra point, ⠠⠸, when it occurs in the middle of a word. It is doubled, ⠸⠸, when more than one word is emphasized, the all-caps sign is used for initialisms and the like. Doubled, it is used for text, such as titles. Names with initials, such as J. S, bach, do not require the cap sign. Lower-case metric units are marked as lower-case, ⠠⠅⠘⠺ ⟨kW⟩ and this is useful, as it ends the scope of the number sign ⠼, ⠼⠁⠉⠚⠠⠓⠨⠏⠁ ⟨130 hPa⟩, ⠼⠁⠉⠚⠠⠅⠘⠧⠁ ⟨130 kVA⟩. Das System der deutschen Blindenschrift,2005
8.
D
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D is the fourth letter of the modern English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet. The Semitic letter Dāleth may have developed from the logogram for a fish or a door, there are many different Egyptian hieroglyphs that might have inspired this. In Semitic, Ancient Greek and Latin, the letter represented /d/, in the Etruscan alphabet the letter was superfluous, the equivalent Greek letter is Delta, Δ. The minuscule form of d consists of a loop and a vertical stroke. It developed by gradual variations on the majuscule form, in handwriting, it was common to start the arc to the left of the vertical stroke, resulting in a serif at the top of the arc. This serif was extended while the rest of the letter was reduced, resulting in an angled stroke, the angled stroke slowly developed into a vertical stroke. In most languages that use the Latin alphabet, and in the International Phonetic Alphabet, however, in the Vietnamese alphabet, it represents the sound /z/ in northern dialects or /j/ in southern dialects. In Fijian it represents a prenasalized stop /nd/, in some languages where voiceless unaspirated stops contrast with voiceless aspirated stops, ⟨d⟩ represents an unaspirated /t/, while ⟨t⟩ represents an aspirated /tʰ/. Examples of such languages include Icelandic, Scottish Gaelic, Navajo, the Roman numeral Ⅾ represents the number 500. D is the grade below C but above E in the grading system. The dictionary definition of D at Wiktionary The dictionary definition of d at Wiktionary
9.
Q
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Q is the 17th letter of the modern English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet. In nearly all using the Latin alphabet it is a consonant. The Semitic sound value of Qôp was /q/, and the form of the letter could have based on the eye of a needle. /q/ is a common to Semitic languages, but not found in many European languages. Some have even suggested that the form of the letter Q is even more ancient, in Greek, qoppa probably came to represent several labialized velar stops, among them /kʷ/ and /kʷʰ/. As a result of sound shifts, these sounds in Greek changed to /p/. Therefore, qoppa was transformed into two letters, qoppa, which stood for the number 90, and phi, which stood for the aspirated sound /pʰ/ that came to be pronounced /f/ in Modern Greek. The Etruscans used Q in conjunction with V to represent /kʷ/, in the earliest Latin inscriptions, the letters C, K and Q were all used to represent the two sounds /k/ and /ɡ/, which were not differentiated in writing. Of these, Q was used before a vowel, K before /a/. Later, the use of C replaced most usages of K and Q, Q survived only to represent /k/ when immediately followed by a /w/ sound, in writing block letters, bisecting tails are fastest to write as they require less precision. Typefaces with a disconnected Q tail, while uncommon, have existed since at least 1529, some early metal type fonts included up to 3 different Qs, a short-tailed Q, a long-tailed Q, and a long-tailed Q-u ligature. Not a fan of long-tailed Qs, American typographer D. B, updike celebrated their demise in his 1922 book Printing Types, claiming that Renaissance printers made their Q tails longer and longer simply to outdo each other. Latin language words, which are more likely than English words to contain Q as their first letter, have also been cited as the reason for their existence. Identifont, an automated typeface identification service that identifies typefaces via questions about their appearance, frutiger considered such Qs to make for more harmonious and gentle typefaces. Some typographers, such as Sophie Elinor Brown, have listed Q as being among their favorite letters. The lowercase q is usually seen as an o with a descender extending from the right side of the bowl, with or without a swash. The qs descender is usually typed without a swash due to the style difference typically seen between the descenders of the g and q. When handwritten, or as part of a font, the descender of the q sometimes finishes with a rightward swash to distinguish it from the letter g
10.
1829 braille
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Louis Brailles original publication, Procedure for Writing Words, Music, and Plainsong in Dots, credits Barbiers night writing as being the basis for the braille script. It differed in a way from modern braille, It contained nine decades of characters rather than the modern five. Braille recognized, however, that the dashes were problematic, being difficult to distinguish from the dots in practice, and those characters were abandoned in the second edition of the book. The first four decades indicated the 40 letters of the alphabet, the fifth the digits, the sixth punctuation, the seventh decade was also used for musical notes. Most of the characters were unassigned. As in modern braille, most of the decades were derived from the first. Decade 5 was not derived from the first, like the first decade, only the top half of the cell was used. The digit 1 was a dash in the top row,2 was dashes in the top and mid rows. 3–5 were a top dash with a left, double, and right dot in the middle, 6–8 were a mid dash with a left, double, and right dot at top. 9 and 0 were a and b shifted to the right and that is, it resembled the 3rd decade with the two bottom dots connected into a line. Decade 7 was formed with a dash in the top row of the cell and that is, it was much like the modern fifth decade with an overstruck dash at the top. Decade 8 was formed by splitting the first decade with a dash and that is, a dash appeared in the middle row, displacing the dots of that row to the bottom of the cell. In the case of first and 3rd characters, which did not have dots in the middle row and that is, this decade was equivalent to adding an overstrike to ⠄⠅⠤⠩⠡⠍⠭⠥⠌⠬. Decade 9 was derived from the fifth by adding a dash in the bottom row and these were left unassigned apart from the first three, which were used when needed as markers of words, music, and plainsong, respectively. Thus the 1st and 5th decades occupied only the top half of the cell, the supplemental signs were ⠄⠤⠜⠼ and a top dash with ⠠⠰. Of the 125 possible patterns,97 were used, the modern 5th decade and other supplemental signs do not appear in the 1829 version of braille, apart from ⠐ and ⠒ in plainsong notation. Punctuation differed slightly from today, even accounting for the shift downward when the dash was dropped from the row of the cell. Anticipating that the dashes might prove problematic, Braille provided that the supplemental sign ⠼ would shift the decade by four and that is, adding it to the first four decades would produce substitutes for the fifth through eighth
11.
Y
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Y is the 25th and penultimate letter in the modern English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet. In the English writing system, it represents a vowel. The names igrek in Polish and i gờ-rét in Vietnamese are both phonetic borrowings of the French name, in Dutch, both Griekse ij and i-grec are used. The original Greek name υ ψιλον has also adapted into several modern languages, in German, for example, it is called Ypsilon. In Portuguese, both names are used, Old English borrowed Latin Y to write the native Old English sound /y/. The name of the letter may be related to ui in various languages, in Middle English it was wi /wiː/. The oldest direct ancestor of English letter Y was the Semitic letter waw, from which also come F, U, V, the Greek and Latin alphabets developed from the Phoenician form of this early alphabet. In Modern English, there is some historical influence from the old English letter yogh. The form of the modern letter Y is derived from the Greek letter upsilon, the Romans first borrowed a form of upsilon as the single letter V, which represented both the vowel sound /u/ and the semivowel consonant sound /w/. This first loaning of upsilon into Latin is not the source of the Modern English Y and it was used to transcribe loanwords from the prestigious Attic dialect of Greek, which had the non-Latin vowel sound /y/, as found in modern French cru, or German grün. Because it was not a sound of Latin, it was usually pronounced /u/ or /i/. Some Latin words of Italic origin also came to be spelled with y, Latin silva was commonly spelled sylva, in analogy with the Greek cognate and synonym ὕλη. The Roman Emperor Claudius proposed introducing a new letter into the Latin alphabet to transcribe the so-called sonus medius, the letter Y was used to represent the sound /y/ in the writing systems of some other languages that adopted the Latin alphabet. In Old English, there was a native /y/ sound, but, by the time of Middle English, /y/ had lost its roundedness and became identical to I. Therefore, many words that originally had I were spelled with Y, in Modern English, Y can represent the same vowel sounds as the letter I. The use of the letter Y to represent a vowel is restricted in Modern English than it was in Middle. It occurs mainly in the three environments, for upsilon in Greek loan-words, at the end of a word. As a consonant in English, Y normally represents a palatal approximant and this use was possibly influenced by the Middle English letter yogh, which could represent /j/
12.
Night writing
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It was designed in 1808 by Charles Barbier in response to Napoleons demand for a code that soldiers could use to communicate silently and without light at night. Called sonography, each grid of dots stands for a character or phoneme, barbiers system was related to the Polybius square, in which a two-digit code represents a character. g. 4–2 for t represented by As many as twelve dots would be needed to represent one symbol, barbiers system was found to be too difficult for soldiers to learn and was rejected by the military. In 1821, Barbier visited the National Institute for the Blind in Paris, France, Braille identified the major failing of the code, which was that the human finger could not encompass the whole symbol without moving and so could not move rapidly from one symbol to another. His modification was to use a 6-dot cell, the Braille system that revolutionized written communication for the visually impaired
