Louis Braille was a French man who changed the lives of blind people all over the world. He was born in 1809 in a small village near Paris. When he was only three years old, he had an accident in his father's workshop and hurt one of his eyes. The wound became infected, and by the age of five he could not see at all.
Louis was very clever, and his parents did everything they could to help him. At ten he was sent to a special school for blind children in Paris. There, books were printed with large letters that stood out from the paper, so that students could feel them with their fingers. The books were very useful, but they were also heavy, slow to read and expensive to make.
While Louis was still a student, a French soldier visited the school and showed the children a system of dots and dashes that soldiers used to read messages at night. Louis realised that this kind of writing could be improved and used by blind people. Over several years, he developed a simple code of raised dots, arranged in small groups. Each group stood for a letter, number or sign.
Today, more than 200 years after his birth, the Braille code is used in almost every language. Blind people of all ages use it to read books, play music and use computers.