Musical Accompaniment: Your Southern Can is Mine by Blind Willie McTell
The concept of reading through the sense of touch is wonderful. For the blind, who have so many challenges, this method of reading opens doors that would otherwise be forever closed to them.
This 1933 picture, by Imogen Cunningham, is a lovely composition.
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My mom used to read Little House on the Prairie books to me when I was small. I remember Laura Ingalls Wilder’s sister Mary had scarlet fever and it blinded her. She went away to a school for the blind and learned braille. But I didn’t wonder then how this incredible method of reading had come about.
Today, looking at Imogene Cunningham’s picture, I did wonder. And do you know who created this wonderful thing? A 15-year-old kid named Louis Braille.
Louis was a student at Institution Nationale des Jeunes Aveugles (National Institute for Blind Children) in Paris when he developed his tactile, six-dot system. He was born a seeing child but an accident permanently robbed him of his sight at the age of 3. Twelve years later, in 1824, he invented the system still used today.
Louis Braille even adapted his system to be used for musical notation. One of my all time favorite musicians is the great Blind Willie McTell. So many of the great Delta blues men were blind but I doubt they had the opportunity to learn braille.
It took a long time for braille to be recognized and taught. In 1878, braille was adopted as an international system for blind writing. Mary Ingalls was an early student. She learned to read and write braille at Iowa College for the Blind, where she studied from1881-1889.
In 1950, the Braille alphabet was universalized. And in 2005, UNESCO recognized the Braille system as a “vital language of communication, as legitimate as all other languages in the world.”
Louis Braille died in 1852, just two days after his 43rd birthday. He never knew the magnitude of the gift he gave the world.
old spirituals 
Louis Braille was a genius to create a system at such a young age for the blind to be able to read! It reminds me a little of shorthand. Symbols that represent words, letters and sounds, but Braille is read by touch. Both are like learning a foreign language.
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