American Modified Braille

Blindness Resource Center
American Modified Braille

AMERICAN MODIFIED BRAILLE

This Braille code was never accepted for use by the British Braille authorities. The code achieved inroads into 19 schools for the blind in the United States, including the Boston school, where it was invented by a blind teacher named J.W. Smith in 1878. The feature of the alphabet was that the most frequently recurring letters are represented by the smallest number of dots. It could therefore be written and read quicker. It's competitor in the United States was New York Point.

Advocates of American Modified Braille code realized the need for a universal English language Braille code that would unite American and British literature into one code. This would not happen until the early part of the twentieth century.

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The New York Institute for Special Education
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