January 4 marked World Braille Day, established by the UN General Assembly to raise awareness of the importance of Braille as a means of communication and the realization of the rights of blind and visually impaired people.
In Ukraine, according to the National Health Service of Ukraine, there has been an increase in the number of cases of vision loss or deterioration: in 2021, 17,478 such diagnoses were registered, in 2022 – 19,551, and in the first seven months of 2023, doctors have already recorded more than 19,000 diagnoses, which exceeded the figure for the whole of 2022. This was reported by the Ministry of Social Policy of Ukraine, noting the impact of full-scale war on the increase in the number of people with visual impairments.
At the same time, official statistics do not usually provide a single public “consolidated” figure for the total number of blind and visually impaired people in Ukraine. Public and specialized resources in various estimates cite figures of around 70,000 blind people and around 100,000 people with visual impairments (including children), emphasizing that these are estimates.
The Braille alphabet was created by French educator Louis Braille: he began working on the tactile code in 1824, based on the ideas of Charles Barbier’s “night writing” developed for the military. Braille adapted the six-dot cell-based system for easy reading and writing by the blind, and the first edition of his method was published in 1829.
