1.
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
2.
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
3.
Universal Character Set characters
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The Unicode Consortium and the International Organisation for Standardisation collaborate on the Universal Character Set. The UCS is a standard to map characters used in natural language, mathematics, music. By creating this mapping, the UCS enables computer software vendors to interoperate, because it is a universal map, it can be used to represent multiple languages at the same time. UCS has a capacity to encode over 1 million characters. Each UCS character is represented by a code point, which is an integer between 0 and 1,114,111, used to represent each character within the internal logic of text processing software. The number of encoded characters is made up as follows,128,019 graphical characters 218 special purpose characters for control, ISO maintains the basic mapping of characters from character name to code point. Often the terms character and code point will get used interchangeably, however, when a distinction is made, a code point refers to the integer of the character, what one might think of as its address. Input methods can be through keyboard or a character palette. The UCS can be divided in various ways, such as by plane, block, character category, the x must be lowercase in XML documents. The nnnn or hhhh may be any number of digits and may include leading zeros, the hhhh may mix uppercase and lowercase, though uppercase is the usual style. In contrast, an entity reference refers to a character by the name of an entity which has the desired character as its replacement text. The entity must either be predefined or explicitly declared in a Document Type Definition, the format is the same as for any entity reference, &name, where name is the case-sensitive name of the entity. Unicode and ISO divide the set of points into 17 planes. As of 2016 ISO and the Unicode Consortium has only allocated characters, the others remain empty and reserved for future use. Most characters are assigned to the first plane, the Basic Multilingual Plane. This is to ease the transition for legacy software since the Basic Multilingual Plane is addressable with just two octets. The characters outside the first plane usually have very specialized or rare use. Each plane corresponds with the value of the one or two hexadecimal digits preceding the four ones, hence U+24321 is in Plane 2, U+4321 is in Plane 0
4.
New York Institute for the Blind
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It was located at 34th Street and Ninth Avenue in Manhattan, New York City. Early in the 20th century, the school was renamed the New York Institute for the Education of the Blind to emphasize its educational character, the institutes multiple facilities now serve children ranging in age from newborn to age 21. Samuel Wood was a wealthy publisher who had been a teacher until he was 40. Recognizing that reading books for children were few, he prepared and published a primer, The Young Childs A B C, or First Book. Wood had seen eager-to-learn blind children in the poorhouses, where their future was bleak. Wood was in his sixties and of a philanthropic bent, samuel Akerly had been for ten years the superintendent and attending physician of the New York Institution for the Deaf. He had been active in developing instruction for deaf-mutes and became interested in doing the same for the blind, the legislation passed, but was amended by one state senator to limit the institutions purpose to children. John Dennison Russ, a philanthropist and physician, had proposed on his own to instruct children in the poorhouse before Akerly made him aware of the newly approved institution. Russ served without salary as the first teacher of the first class — three blind orphan boys brought from the poorhouse to a home on Canal Street. After two months, three boys were added and the school moved to Mercer Street. Teaching was by experiment, with successful methods discovered as time progressed, a demonstration of the students progress was given at the end of the year, generating public interest and stimulating contributions and new benefactors. By 1833, ten students, four of them girls, had joined the original six. In 1834, New York State began paying for some students, by now there were 26 students in all, and Russ was assisted by one teacher of literary subjects, a foreman of mechanical pursuits, and a teacher of music. According to the history, Dr. Russ achieved results most remarkable. Russ resigned from the school in 1835, fanny Crosby, a poet who wrote the lyrics for thousands of Christian hymns, was both a student and a teacher at the institute. Blind since infancy, she entered the institute in 1835, at age 14 and she was a student for 9 years, then a teacher from September 1847 to March 1858. Grover Cleveland and his brother William came to be employed at the school in 1853 and 1854, at that time there were about 116 pupils, ranging in age from 8 to 25, half male and half female. To finance his studies for the ministry, William was teaching the older students history, philosophy, logic
5.
Helen Keller
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Helen Adams Keller was an American author, political activist, and lecturer. She was the first deaf-blind person to earn a bachelor of arts degree and her birthplace in West Tuscumbia, Alabama, is now a museum and sponsors an annual Helen Keller Day. A prolific author, Keller was well-traveled and outspoken in her convictions, a member of the Socialist Party of America and the Industrial Workers of the World, she campaigned for womens suffrage, labor rights, socialism, antimilitarism, and other similar causes. She was inducted into the Alabama Womens Hall of Fame in 1971 and was one of twelve inaugural inductees to the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame on June 8,2015. Helen proved to the world that people could all learn to communicate. She also taught that people are capable of doing things that hearing people can do. She is one of the most famous people in history. Helen Adams Keller was born on June 27,1880, in Tuscumbia and her family lived on a homestead, Ivy Green, that Helens grandfather had built decades earlier. She had two siblings, Mildred Campbell and Phillip Brooks Keller, and two older half-brothers from her fathers prior marriage, James and William Simpson Keller. Her father, Arthur H. Keller, spent many years as an editor for the Tuscumbia North Alabamian and her paternal grandmother was the second cousin of Robert E. Lee. Her mother, Kate Adams, was the daughter of Charles W. Adams, though originally from Massachusetts, Charles Adams also fought for the Confederate Army during the American Civil War, earning the rank of colonel. Her paternal lineage was traced to Casper Keller, a native of Switzerland, one of Helens Swiss ancestors was the first teacher for the deaf in Zurich. Keller reflected on this coincidence in her first autobiography, stating there is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors. Helen Keller was born with the ability to see and hear, at 19 months old, she contracted an illness described by doctors as an acute congestion of the stomach and the brain, which might have been scarlet fever or meningitis. The illness left her deaf and blind. Even though blind and deaf, Helen Keller had passed through many obstacles and she learned how to tell which person was walking by from the vibrations their footsteps would make. The sex and age of the person could be identified by how strong, julian Chisolm, an eye, ear, nose, and throat specialist in Baltimore, for advice. Chisholm referred the Kellers to Alexander Graham Bell, who was working with children at the time
6.
English Braille
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English Braille, also known as Grade-2 Braille, is the braille alphabet used for English. It consists of 250 or so letters, numerals, punctuation marks, formatting marks, contractions, some English Braille letters, such as ⠡ ⟨ch⟩, correspond to more than one letter in print. There are three levels of complexity in English Braille, Grade 1 is a one-to-one transcription of printed English, and is restricted to basic literacy. Grade 2, which is universal in print beyond basic literacy materials, abandons one-to-one transcription in many places. Grade 3 is not a system, but any of various personal shorthands. It is almost never found in publications, most of this article describes the 1994 American edition of Grade-2 Braille, which is largely equivalent to British Grade-2 Braille. Some of the differences with Unified English Braille, which was adopted by various countries between 2005 and 2012, are discussed at the end. Braille was originally intended, and is portrayed, as a re-encoding of the English orthography that is used by sighted people. However, for the blind, braille is an independent writing system, Braille was introduced to Britain in 1861. In 1876, a French-based system with a few hundred English contractions and abbreviations was adopted as the predominant script in Great Britain, however, the contractions and abbreviations proved unsatisfactory, and in 1902 the current grade-2 system, called Revised Braille, was adopted in the British Commonwealth. In 1878, the ideal of basing all braille alphabets of the world on the original French alphabetic order was accepted by Britain, Germany, and Egypt. A partially contracted English Braille, Grade 1½, was adopted in Britain in 1918, in 1991, an American proposal was made for Unified English Braille, intended to eliminate the confusion caused by competing standards for academic uses of English Braille. After several design revisions, it has since adopted by the Commonwealth countries starting in 2005. The chief differences with Revised Braille are in punctuation, symbols, and formatting, more accurately reflecting print conventions in matters such as brackets, mathematical notation, the 64 braille patterns are arranged into decades based on the numerical order of those patterns. In addition, for each there are two additional mirror-image patterns, and finally there are three patterns that utilize only the bottom row of the cell. The final pattern, the empty cell ⟨⠀⟩, is used as a space, cells 1 through 25 plus 40 are assigned to the 26 letters of the basic Latin alphabet. The other 37 cells, when they are used at all, are used for punctuation and are typically assigned different values in different languages. The English grade-two values are as follows, cells with dots on only the right side do not have equivalents in printed English, and are explained in the notes
