An inspiring picture-book biography of Louis Braille—a blind boy so determined to read that he invented his own alphabet. **Winner of a Schneider Family Book Award!** Louis Braille was just five years old when he lost his sight. He was a clever boy, determined to live like everyone else, and what he wanted more than anything was to be able to read. Even at the school for the blind in Paris, there were no books for him. And so he invented his own alphabet—a whole new system for writing that could be read by touch. A system so ingenious that it is still used by the blind community today. Award-winning writer Jen Bryant tells Braille’s inspiring story with a lively and accessible text, filled with the sounds, the smells, and the touch of Louis’s world. Boris Kulikov’s inspired paintings help readers to understand what Louis lost, and what he was determined to gain back through books. An author’s note and additional resources at the end of the book complement the simple story and offer more information for parents and teachers. Praise for Six Dots: "An inspiring look at a child inventor whose drive and intelligence changed to world—for the blind and sighted alike."—Kirkus Reviews "Even in a crowded field, Bryant’s tightly focused work, cast in the fictionalized voice of Braille himself, is particularly distinguished."—Bulletin, starred review "This picture book biography strikes a perfect balance between the seriousness of Braille’s life and the exuberance he projected out into the world." — School Library Journal, starred review

Louis Braille certainly wasn't your average teenager. Blind from the age of four, he was only fifteen when in 1824 he invented a reading system that converted printed words into columns of raised dots. Through touch, Braille opened the world of books to the sightless, and almost two hundred years later, no one has ever improved upon his simple, brilliant idea.

Presents the life of the nineteenth-century Frenchman, accidentally blinded as a child, who originated the raised dot system of reading and writing used throughout the world by the blind.

Louis Braille: A Touch of Genius is the first ever, full-color biography to include thirty-one of his extant letters, some written by his own hand, and translated into English for the first time.Three great men were born in the early weeks of January 1809: Abraham Lincoln, Charles Darwin, and Louis Braille. Only one has remained virtually unknown ? the man who invented a means of reading and writing still used today in almost every country in the world, adapted to almost every known language from Albanian to Zulu.Born sighted, Louis Braille accidentally blinded himself at the age of 3. He was lucky enough to be sent to a school for blind children in Paris, one of the first in the world. There, at the age of sixteen, he worked tirelessly on a revolutionary system of finger reading that became braille. He was a talented musician, astute businessman, and genius inventor ? collaborating with another Frenchman to invent the first dot-matrix printer around 1840.

A biography of the 19th century Frenchman who developed Braille. The book spans Braille's life from childhood through his days at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth and into his final years, when the alphabet he invented was finally gaining acceptance.

The life of the nineteenth-century Frenchman who invented a system of reading for the blind that is used universally.

The integration of the blind into society has always meant taking on prejudices and inaccurate representations. Weygand's highly accessible anthropological and cultural history introduces us to both real and imaginary figures from the past, uncovering French attitudes towards the blind from the Middle Ages through the first half of the nineteenth century. Much of the book, however, centers on the eighteenth century, the enlightened age of Diderot's emblematic blind man and of the Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, founded by Valentin Haüy, the great benefactor of blind people. Weygand paints a moving picture of the blind admitted to the institutions created for them and of the conditions under which they lived, from the officially-sanctioned beggars of the medieval Quinze-Vingts to the cloth makers of the Institute for Blind Workers. She has also uncovered their fictional counterparts in an impressive array of poems, plays, and novels.The book concludes with Braille, whose invention of writing with raised dots gave blind people around the world definitive access to silent reading and to written communication.