A French man called Louis Braille created the braille code in 1824, at the tender age of 15 after he lost his sight as a young child in an accident. It was only after his death that in France, braille was adopted as the preferred writing system for blind people. Eventually it was acknowledged and used in other countries and in 1870, it was adopted in Britain. In 1932 a universal braille code for English was created. 

Braille is a tactile form of reading and writing and is read through touch. Letters and numbers are made up of a rectangle with six dots in two columns, each letter and number uses a set of raised dots to be identified and read. 

Anyone can learn braille and it is a universal system, available in most languages in the world. 

Statistics show - 

In the UK there are approximately 340,000 people who are registered as blind or partially sighted, this is a subset of the over 2 million people living in the UK with a vision impairment.

There are approximately 43 million people worldwide who are registered blind and 295 million people who have a moderate to severe vision impairment.