Braille is a tactile system of writing designed to allow visually-impaired people to read and write. Cells composed of dots form various patterns which correspond to letters, numbers, or punctuation marks. Braille has been developed for many languages to adapt to the various alphabets and writing systems used around the world.
Braille was invented by Louis Braille in the 19th century to write allow blind people to read the French alphabet, and it was soon adapted to other major languages around the world. Generally, Braille is similar across languages; for example, the Braille symbol ⠙ represents the letter D in Spanish Braille, D in Italian Braille, D in Indonesian Braille, and even the equivalent letter Delta (Δ) in Greek Braille. In 1953 UNESCO established international standards regarding the uniformity of braille alphabets which govern patterns to follow for the creation of new Braille alphabets. I reach out to communities around the world and follow UNESCO's guidelines to develop new Braille alphabets to help visually-impaired people.
After reading about how Braille works in different languages, I wanted to develop it for smaller languages in order to help aid their revitalization and do my part to help reverse the global trend of language loss.
I am not blind and neither was anyone I knew growing up. Through my work, I have become friends with blind people around the world.
While I can speak a bit of Polish, Italian, Greek, and some other languages, the only languages I speak fluently are Spanish and my native language, English.
I was born in New York City, grew up in the Silicon Valley, and went to university in Washington DC where I remained for a couple years after I graduated.
Currently I am semi-nomadic and traveling around the world for work/adventure, though I am somewhere in the United States the majority of the time.
Thanks to the efforts of kind volunteers, you can now read about me and my work on Wikipedia in eight languages (so far)! If you are interested in writing an article in your own language, check out Wikipedia's guide on the topic and find some sources in my website's news section.