(UFSM -2006)HISTORY OF LOUIS BRAILLELouis Braille

(UFSM - 2006)

HISTORY OF LOUIS BRAILLE

Louis Braille was born on January 4, 1809, in Coupvray, ¹³a small town near Paris, France. His father was a saddler, and the young Louis enjoyed playing in his father's workshop. When he was three, Louis accidentally punctured his eye with an awl, a sharp tool used to punch holes in leather. Infection ¹⁴eventually set in and spread to his other eye, leaving him ⁹completely blind. Louis developed the braille system by the time he was 15.

With the support of a local priest and schoolteacher, Louis' parents were determined to allow him to develop his ²demonstrated intelligence. He was enrolled in a regular school where he learn by listening and excelled in his studies. By the age of 10, he earned a scholarship to the Royal Institution for Blind Youth in Paris. There he learned to read letters that were raised on a page. ¹⁵Since these letters were made by pressing shaped copper wire onto a page, it was impossible for people who were blind to write anything for themselves.

At the Institution, Louis was first ³introduced to a coded system of ¹raised dots. 10In 1821, ¹¹a French army captain, Charles Barbier de la Serre, visited the school to introduced his invention, "Night Writing". Night Writing was designed for soldiers to communicate at night without speaking. In his system, a series of 12 raised dots were used to represent sounds that, when combined, would form words. It proved to be too ⁴complicated, and the army eventually rejected it.

Barbier adapted his system for use by people who are blind, but the 12-dot phonetic system still prove cumbersome. Recognizing how useful this tactile system could be, Louis set out to experiment with a ⁵simplified version. Eventually, he settled on a system based on normal spelling using six dots to represent the standard alphabet.

⁷Louis Braille went on to become an ⁶admired and respect teacher at the Institution. 16But even though his system allowed people who are blind to write using a simple stylus, braille was not widely used. Plagued by ill health, Louis died of tuberculosis on January 6, 1852. In 1868, Dr. Thomas Armitage and a group of four blind men founded the British and Foreign Society for Improving the Embossed Literature for the Blind. This organization grew to become the Royal National Institute of the Blind, the largest publisher of braille in Europe and Britain's largest organization for people who are blind or visually impaired.

The braille code was eventually recognized for its practicality and simplicity and became a worldwide standard. Today, braille literacy is as essential as print ⁸literacy.

In 1952, the accomplishments of Louis Braille were fully recognized by the French government. His body was exhumed and reburied in the Pantheon, ¹²the resting place of France's national heroes.

http://www.cnib.ca/school-package/4.htm - 07/6/05

Alguns verbos podem tornar-se qualificadores. No texto há o caso do verbo "raise" (ref. 1), que pode tornar-se o qualificador "raised". Esta mesma configuração ocorre nos verbos destacados, EXCETO