January 3, 2022 *NPRD Greetings *
*On World Braille Day, 2022* World Braille Day is celebrated on the 4th of January, marking the birth anniversary of Louis Braille, the creator of this writing system. Braille is a tactile representation of alphabetic and numerical symbols using six dots to represent each letter and number, and even musical, mathematical, and scientific symbols. It is used by people with visual impairment to read the same books that the sighted read in printed forms. It is an extremely important tool in the context of education, freedom of opinion and expression, and social inclusion of people with visual impairment. Louis Braille was a French educator born in 1809. His father was a harness maker. As a child, Louis loved to watch his father work with leather in his workshop. One day, at the age of three, he sneaked into the workshop and tried to make holes in leather with an awl, like he had watched his father do. Accidentally, the awl hit one of his eyes leading to an injury. Eventually, he lost sight in the other eye too. His parents did everything to support and educate young Louis and raised him in the same way as his siblings. He was enrolled in a local school. And later, he was sent to the National Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, where he would go on to invent the revolutionary Braille system. The date for Braille Day had been chosen by the United Nations General Assembly in 2018, and the day has been celebrated since 2019. The objective of the day is to ‘raise awareness of the importance of Braille as a means of communication in the full realization of the human rights for the blind and partially sighted people.’ The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the need to intensify the efforts to make information accessible to all members of society. It is of utmost importance to produce essential information related to health guidelines as also other information in accessible formats (like Braille, audible formats, and so on). We know now, better than we did before, that accessible information is critical not only for the safety and betterment of some groups of people but for society as a whole. Unfortunately, this has not been happening in the manner in which ought to be and there has been inequity in access to information and services. The NPRD conveys its greetings to all of you on this occasion. It stands in solidarity with all visually impaired friends in their fight for a more accessible, equitable, egalitarian, and disabled-friendly world. *(Prepared by a Volunteer)* *National Platform for the Rights of the Disabled* -- National Platform for the Rights of the Disabled (NPRD) 36, Pt. Ravishankar Shukla Lane New Delhi 110 001 Tel. 11-23387674; 9868768543 -- Disclaimer: 1. Contents of the mails, factual, or otherwise, reflect the thinking of the person sending the mail and AI in no way relates itself to its veracity; 2. AI cannot be held liable for any commission/omission based on the mails sent through this mailing list.. Search for old postings at: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "AccessIndia" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/a/accessindia.org.in/d/msgid/accessindia/CAGWwanfFyRsEfshk92nXbP7cicDbK6wTFh36Xe%3DRKjMiaO1LVA%40mail.gmail.com.
