About six years ago, my world turned upside down as my sight receded into blurs and whorls of color and light. One thing that changed the most was how I read.

As someone who loved books in the madly-in-love sense of the word, I didn’t want to abandon the written word that I loved so. Against the advice of a low vision specialist who told me that Braille was too hard, I threw myself into the world of tactile words with equal parts petulance and determination.

The specialist was right. It was hard. Although it took me only two weeks to memorize the code, the dots under my fingers felt disconnected from the printed words I loved. It was as if I had regressed to a toddler, struggling to link the lines and curves they saw to the sounds they knew so well. Over the years as my fingers grew more sensitive and my mind more receptive, I finally demystified the raised dots. I finally felt

People think of Braille as many things. Some assume it’s a language. Other call it a writing and reading system for the blind. Many look at the confounding raised dots and wonder how anyone could make sense of them. Very few think of Braille as a form of typography.

The New Oxford American Dictionary calls typography “the style and appearance of the printed word,” which excludes all tactile typefaces entirely. Braille, after all, is embossed, not printed. A Google search for “tactile typography” returns results of raised print without a single dot in sight … according to my magnifier.

The word typography has two Greek roots: typos “form” or “impression” and graphein “to write.” During ancient times, the word referred to the embossed seals and marks on currencies made from punches and dies. In the spirit of the word’s origins, perhaps we should embrace the more expansive meaning of typography to mean all forms and impressions of writing, even if you’re feeling instead of seeing them.

The Birth of a Typeface that Dared to Be Different

For a typeface so synonymous with blindness, few know that Braille almost got stamped out of existence because it was too different. Yet, that difference was what made it work.

For most of history, most Europeans thought of blindness as a curse, a punishment for your sins. Hence, there was little effort to educate the supposedly sinful blind people. That changed when the blind became subjects of charity, and Valentin Haüy invented the first tactile typeface: print lettering embossed onto heavy paper. Therein the concept of touch reading came into existence for the first time. This raised typeface, however, was far from a success, however. Feeling along the lines, angles, and curves of embossed letters was an imprecise and inefficient way of reading. It was also a lengthy and expensive process to produce such books, resulting in very few being in existence. The third strike against raised type was that it left blind people barely able to read and completely unable to write.

In 1824, a 15-year-old blind student at the Royal Institute of the Young Blind in Paris heard of a military communications technique called night writing developed by Capitan Charles Barbier. This system of 12 raised dots conferred certain military advantages. It was indecipherable by the enemy and could be read in the dark, so the officer wouldn’t become a target of enemy gunmen when they lit a lantern to read.

Louis Braille saw the potential in this system immediately even as his instructors dismissed it. He winnowed the 12-dot system down to 6, making for more efficient reading. The tactile typeface took off amongst the students as they used it to take notes in class and pass secret messages to one another. The administration and teachers took a far dimmer view of the new way of interacting with words. One went as far to burn the writing implementations, leaving the students to steal forks from the kitchens so they could preserve their newfound access to words.

The outright hostility that met what would one day become Braille came from two sources. Many sighted teachers thought it improper for the blind and visually impaired to use a code different from the sighted, regardless of how difficult the reading process was. The other, more insidious reason, was that many schools for the blind profited off the crafts made by their blind protegés. If the blind students become too educated and too independent, they would have the temerity to demand their share of profits or even set up businesses of their own.

Braille usage spread over the ensuing century despite the initial resistance, with famous figures such as Helen Keller and Jacob Bolotin (the first born-blind doctor) using it. Braille beat out other tactile typefaces — many of which involved raised lines — to become the dominant tactile typeface all over the world.

Once you put your fingers on Braille, it’s easy to understand why it beat out other tactile typefaces. You can sense the pattern of the raised dots with a single touch. Raised lines, however, require some up-and-down movement to discern, called scrubbing in Braille-speak. Scrubbing hampers reading speed because it requires you to pause and change directions. It would be as if you had to stop every so often to look up and down a page. Reading efficiently by touch should be a fluid motion of your fingers over the tactile type with minimal scrubbing. Adept Braille readers can read more than 400 words per minute, beating out the average visual reading speed.

How Braille Works

“Oh, my! That must’ve been so hard to learn … you know, like French!” people often say when they see me reading Braille. The misconception that Braille is a unique language flummoxes me. Perhaps it comes from the frequent conflation of Braille and signed language. The former being a tactile rendering of the written word and the latter being an actual language in its own right. Or perhaps it’s the inscrutability of the raised dots, which must seem so alien to those used to visual typography. Whatever it is, this misconception has led to a fundamental misunderstanding of Braille. We need to look at it as a typeface with unique design concerns due to its tactile nature.

Braille isn’t a language. It represents a system of writing using a pattern of raised dots. As such, Braille must convert an entire alphabet, punctuation system, and formatting markups into some combination of 6 dots. The dots are arranged in a matrix of three rows and two columns, called a cell. Dot patterns in one or two cells can represent a single letter, a combination of letters, a whole word, or a punctuation mark. Additionally, Braille has formatting indicators similar to markup language.

Legibility concerns have led to stringent sizing and spacing rules (kerning and line spacing in typography-speak). “Braille design can only be read if it’s measured correctly to fit under the reader’s fingertips. If cells are too small, too large, too close together or uneven in spacing, the message can’t be read properly,” says Frances Mary D’Andrea, chair of the Braille Authority of North America. “There is a standard size for each cell and standard distances between cells and even within a cell.”

If you’ve been following along, you’ve probably realized that space is a significant constraint for tactile typography. Without the ability to reduce the size of cells, a sentence with many punctuation marks and complex formatting can take up a disproportionate amount of space. This had the potential to slow down reading and consume a lot of paper. That’s why the Anglophone Braille world has multiple “grades” of Braille. Grade One, also called uncontracted Braille, is a transliteration of written English, primarily used with beginner Braille students. Grade Two, also called contracted Braille, uses contractions to mitigate the space issue. Contractions, as the name suggests, compresses common words and letter combinations such as the and er into one- or two-cell dot patterns. A sentence in contracted Braille appears, with each parentheses indicating a contraction, as: (The) y(ea)r is (almost) d(one). To give you an idea of how much space contractions save, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in Grade One is seven volumes while being only two in Grade Two.