Decapoint
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Decapoint, or Raphigraphy, was a tactile form of the Latin script invented by Louis Braille as a writing system that could be used by both the blind and sighted.[1] It was published in 1839, over a decade after the six-dot braille alphabet.[2] Letters retained their form, and so were legible without training to the sighted, but the lines were composed of embossed dots like those used in braille. "Decapoint" refers to the writing system, while "raphigraphy" is the use of a raphigraph machine to produce writing.
Each letter was ten dots tall with variable widths[2], hence the name decapoint.[3] It was originally written with a slate and stylus; In order for writing to be legible from the front of a page, it was pressed in from the back as a mirror image.[3] This process was difficult and time consuming, and the text was impractically large.
In order to make the process of writing decapoint text easier, Pierre-François-Victor Foucault, assisted by Louis Braille, invented the raphigraph (needle-writer) in 1841.[3] The raphigraph could write one column of a character at a time with its ten keys.[1]
While decapoint had the advantage of being legible to sighted people without training,[1] it was much less practical and space efficient. The prevalence of ink typewriters in the 1880s and the invention of the braille writer in 1892 contributed to decapoint and the raphigraph falling out of use. Decapoint was sometimes used anyway into the 1930s.[1]
References
[edit]- ^ a b c d "His inventions". museelouisbraille.com. Retrieved 2025-07-18.
- ^ a b Braille, Louis (1839). "Nouveau procede pour representer des points la forme meme des letters, les cartes de geographie, les figures de geometrie, les caracteres de musiques, etc., a l'usage des aveugles" [New Method for Representing by Dots the Form of the Letters Themselves, Maps, Geometric Figures, Musical Symbols, etc., for Use by the Blind] (in French).
- ^ a b c Mellor, C. Michael (2006). Louis Braille: A Touch of Genius. National Braille Press. pp. 88–93. ISBN 9780939173709.
- Louis Invents Decapoint Archived 2017-08-03 at the Wayback Machine, American Foundation for the Blind
- The Raphigraphie by Louis Braille in 1839, character set worked up optically (German)