RNIB braille 200th anniversary UK tour starts at Barking Library

It is a year-long campaign visiting libraries up and down the country, organised by the Royal National Institute for Blind People (RNIB), that began with the Braille Buddies group in Barking.

“Braille is designed for our fingers just like print is for the eyes,” RNIB’s Dave Williams explains. “My wife can identify her medications and it also gave me confidence to make a best man speech at a friend’s wedding.

“It’s a vital tool for politicians and lawyers relying on braille to give legally-binding statements verbatim, or musicians like Stevie Wonder who once told me how he uses braille to create and edit lyrics.”

Dave is the RNIB’s design ambassador who is a lifelong braille user.

“There is a critical need to expand braille education,” he insists. “It ensures that more children with vision impairment and adults with sight loss can benefit from this powerful tool.”

The campaigners want to tell the story of braille — but say it’s “up to blind people to write the next chapter”.
 

Braille user Dominica Eze, 80, from Dagenham (Image: RNIB)

Abiola Olabode runs the Braille Buddies group in Barking, inspired by Devic’s disease which affects his vision and mobility.

He mastered the basics in three weeks working with Barking and Dagenham Council’s visual rehabilitation officer.

He said: “Learning braille gave me a passion to do something with my time. So we formed Braille Buddies in 2016 and people came from all over east London.”

Dominica Eze, an 80-year-old from Dagenham and member of Abiola’s Braille Buddies, has retinitis pigmentosa which is causing her vision to deteriorate.

She said: “Braille helps with my medicine knowing what tablets to take and if I’m in a lift to read which floor to stop at. I also use it for reading labels on food.”

Andy Apsey uses a braille reader at home in Barking for his business appointments. He learnt braille when he was four years old — at the same age a sighted person would learn to read print.

Braille was invented in Paris in 1824 by a teenager who had been blind from the age of three. Louis Braille was blinded in one eye from an accident with a stitching tool in his father’s harness-making workshop. An infection set in resulting in total blindness.

He began developing the six-dot tactile reading system from memories of feeling the raised dots in leather caused by the stitching tool.

Those memories have led today to blind people all over the world being able to read through feeling raised dots.

Barking and Dagenham deputy council leader Saima Ashraf said: “Celebrating the 200th anniversary of braille shows the impact of this remarkable system.”

But misconceptions about braille persist. So the RNIB is running events throughout the school year to promote the braille code in education and employment, with its versatility in language and technical subjects in a world becoming more reliant on digital information.

Braille Buddies meets every Friday at Dagenham Library from 10am to 12.30pm, except the last Friday of the month.

Every six minutes someone in the UK begins to lose their sight, the RNIB points out.

The charity runs a national helpline on 030 3123 9999.