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LISA: I'm Lisa Mullins, and this is The World. This weekend marked the 200th anniversary of the birth of Louis Braille. The Frenchman's invention of a writing system for the blind was nothing short of revolutionary. And as The World's Alex Gallafent tells us, it's an invention that keeps going strong.

ALEX: Peter White is the BBC's Disability Affairs Specialist. He uses Braille everyday, and he says it's based on a simple idea.

PETER: Each Braille letter is made up of a combination of one to six dots, arranged in two rows with three vertical dots in each row. The two rows together are called a cell. To read, you touch the cells which have different combinations of dots pushed down to represent letter.

ALEX: There are up to 63 different combinations of pushed out dots, arranged in a domino-like cell, three down, two across. John Godbi is from Britain's Royal National Institute for the Blind.

JOHN: Yeah. The first 26 you use for letters of the alphabet and then you get others for which you can use for commonly occurring letter groups and words.

ALEX: Sounds simple, but it didn't occur to anyone until Louis Braille came along. He was at a school for the Blind in France. He lost his sight at the age of 3 playing with knives. When he was 15 he encountered the work of a soldier in Napoleon's army. That soldier had invented a system of so-called “night writing” intending to allow military instructions to be passed hand-to-hand under cover of darkness. The idea was complicated. It used embossed characters made up of 12 dots, too large for a finger to read in one touch. The military rejected it but Louis Braille saw the potential. He reduced the cell size to six dots, small enough for the human finger to recognize each symbol easily. And those symbols work in pretty much any language. The dots just get assigned different meanings. There's even a difference between British and American Braille. The BBC's Peter White spoke to a group of students at the Tennessee School for the Blind in Nashville.

PETER: We don't use capitals. We don't use capitals. But we do – when I read American Braille, I mean, I read obviously it's not difficult for me to read and understand capitals. Did you know there was a big argument going on? It's been going on for years.

FEMALE: I had no idea. I had no clue. That's totally fascinating. I just can't imagine English without capitals.

PETER: We say it takes up a lot of room, you see. Well, you know, it's an extra dot every sentence.

ALEX: That simplicity and economy means Braille can capture everything the printed word can't.

DAVID: With permission, Mr. Speaker, I wish to make a statement on the government's approach.

ALEX: David Blunket was a senior member of Tony Blair's British government. He says Braille has been invaluable to him for having facts and figures literally at his fingertips. He's not so fond of it for speeches.

DAVID: Braille's not an easy media in public. It's fine in private, but it is bulky, it is difficult. You've often got multiple sheets and you can't highlight in the way that you can with proper underlining or italics. You can't do bold in Braille so I tear the edges when I've got something I really have to deliver, and that makes it a bit easier just to move quickly to where you need to be.

ALEX: Other technologies for the blind have come along in recent years, but Braille, shortcomings and all, remains essential. For The World, I'm Alex Gallafent.

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