On the 200th anniversary of the birth of Braille's inventor, bestselling crime writer Ian Rankin has launched a campaign calling on writers, publishers and booksellers to make more books available to the visually impaired.
Rankin is also backing an appeal to raise £2m to rehouse the UK's leading Braille printing press, the Scottish Braille Press, which is struggling to meet demand with its current premises.
Just 4% of books published in the UK currently make it into Braille, large print or audio formats, according to the Royal National Institute of Blind People, and Rankin - whose son attends the Royal Blind School in Edinburgh - hopes the campaign, which he is launching on behalf of charity Royal Blind, will unite the books world in improving access to fiction and non-fiction for the visually impaired.
Rankin, creator of hardboiled Edinburgh detective Rebus, said that Braille was a hugely important "gateway to education and inspiration". He added that "I support anything that can be done to improve access to reading in all formats from Braille to large print."
The Royal Blind appeal, launched to mark the bicentenary of the birth of Braille's inventor Louis Braille on 4 January, also saw a Braille passage from Rankin's bestselling novel Fleshmarket Close pinned to the walls of the real street in the centre of Edinburgh today, and the publication of a Braille version of his book Death Is Not the End.
"You can get the main classics [in Braille] but anyone who wants to extend their reading outside those - and of course we all do - and read the most recently published books, will find it difficult. There is a huge need to improve the range available," said Royal Blind chief executive Richard Hellewell. "Braille is used all over the world but outside our community there is little knowledge or understanding about its use. We see National Braille Week as a great way to raise awareness, which we hope will inspire interest and support for Braille."
David Mann, campaigns manager at the RNIB, agreed. "Because Braille exists and does give the potential for equal access, it is very alarming that even now, 200 years after it was invented, it is not routine for things to be available in Braille," he said. "It is incredibly frustrating to hear a book recommended on the radio or by a friend or to see it on television and to know it won't be available in a bookshop - or if it is, not until a couple of years down the line ... It's just a question of equality."
A brief history of Braille
Louis Braille was born in Coupvray near Paris on 4 January 1809. An accident in his father's workshop at the age of three meant he developed an eye infection, which led to total blindness.
In 1819 he won a scholarship to the Royal Institution for Blind Youth in Paris, where he experimented with ways to make an alphabet that could be read with the fingertips.
At the age of 15, he invented the six-dot Braille system, which evolved from the Ecriture Nocturne (night writing) code invented by Charles Barbier de la Serre to send military messages that could be read on the battlefield at night.
Braille died in 1852, and his system, which uses raised dots to represent the letters of the print alphabet, is the standard form of writing and reading used by blind people in virtually every language throughout the world. There are two grades of Braille: Grade One represents each letter as one Braille cell, while Grade Two, for experienced users, is a form of shorthand contracting groups of letters into a single cell.
