Braille: Facilitating the Lives of the Blind
When we were considering our topic, our main criteria for ourselves was to choose an innovation that was meaningful to today’s world, and that really helped improve people’s lives. We scoured the Internet for innovations that met these standards. Originally, we were interested in some sort of medical innovation. While searching a database, we came across the invention of braille, and while this wasn’t exactly related to medicine, it struck us as a suitable topic that we both found interesting.
First, we visited our school library, where we mainly found encyclopedia articles. Our next step was to search the web, where we found many informative websites created by organizations for the blind. We emailed a few of these sites with further research questions. A very helpful woman working for one of these organizations gave us the email address of a friend of hers who has been blind since birth. We conducted an interview with her via email that procured extremely useful firsthand accounts of what its like to be blind, and how valuable braille is to everyday life. We visited two local public libraries, where we found a few helpful books. Our final step was to visit the Stanford library where we spent hours hunting through their stacks. From this, we attained many more sources.
We chose to create a website for many reasons. First, we wanted a visually appealing project, and wanted to use color, pictures, and documents to enhance our creation. We liked having text and images, not just one or the other. Also, websites make it easier to organize information in a clear and concise way. We liked the idea of creating different pages, each with its own set of information. Our final reason for choosing a website was that we could easily include media clips to help further support our point.
The invention of braille revolutionized education and communication for the blind. Before braille was invented, there was no effective system, and there was nothing even remotely similar to braille. The world was not unified in its system, which made the lives of the blind even harder. To this day, braille is used across the world, in many different cultures and languages. The invention of braille was a milestone in the history of communication for the blind.
First, we visited our school library, where we mainly found encyclopedia articles. Our next step was to search the web, where we found many informative websites created by organizations for the blind. We emailed a few of these sites with further research questions. A very helpful woman working for one of these organizations gave us the email address of a friend of hers who has been blind since birth. We conducted an interview with her via email that procured extremely useful firsthand accounts of what its like to be blind, and how valuable braille is to everyday life. We visited two local public libraries, where we found a few helpful books. Our final step was to visit the Stanford library where we spent hours hunting through their stacks. From this, we attained many more sources.
We chose to create a website for many reasons. First, we wanted a visually appealing project, and wanted to use color, pictures, and documents to enhance our creation. We liked having text and images, not just one or the other. Also, websites make it easier to organize information in a clear and concise way. We liked the idea of creating different pages, each with its own set of information. Our final reason for choosing a website was that we could easily include media clips to help further support our point.
The invention of braille revolutionized education and communication for the blind. Before braille was invented, there was no effective system, and there was nothing even remotely similar to braille. The world was not unified in its system, which made the lives of the blind even harder. To this day, braille is used across the world, in many different cultures and languages. The invention of braille was a milestone in the history of communication for the blind.
