World Braille Day today

Govt urged to set up dedicated institutes to teach special script

ISLAMABAD:

World Braille Day is observed on January 4 every year, in memory of Louis Braille, the inventor of special symbols for the visually impaired.

Although the script has been around for nearly 200 years, there is currently no significant arrangement in Pakistan to teach it to the blind.

PIMS Assistant Professor of Ophthalmology Dr Inayatullah Khan argues, “The braille alphabet is a great achievement for the visually impaired. Centres should be set up in PIMS and other major institutes to teach it to the public.”

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He said that while there were institutions in the country dedicated to this purpose, there was a dire need to educate people about this script, so that visually-impaired people could also learn like their peers.

Braille is a way of reading embossed letters by touching the paper with one’s fingertips. This method of literacy was invented in 1834 by Louis Braille, a blind man from a seminary in Paris.

He created a symbolic set in the form of raised dots on a piece of paper. These raised points can easily be felt with the help of fingertips. Thus he made a complete language from the dots on the paper.

The language does not rely on actual letters of the alphabet, but on the symbols of letters and numbers. Braille has also been used and developed by UNESCO in all parts of the world since 1949.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 4^th, 2022.