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A three-year-old boy called Louis Braille was playing with some tools when suddenly a sharp
tool accidentally poked his left eye. His left eye became swollen. When Louis rubbed his eyes,
___1___ became swollen too. He was not able to see clearly. His eyesight became poorer and
poorer and he was soon completely ___2___.
It was terribly sad for a little boy like Louis to become blind suddenly. But Louis was not
helpless. He quickly learned to get used to his blindness and ___3___ . He learned to move
carefully around the house and village by using a stick to feel his way about. When he was seven
years old, he attended the village school. ___4___ . Although he could not see or read, he did not
let this discourage him. He listened carefully to all that ___5___ said and remembered clearly
what she taught in class. In this way, he was able to top his class.
Louis was so good in his schoolwork that at the age of ten, he won a place in a school for blind
boys in Paris. This was the only ___6___ for blind boys at that time and those who attended it
had been carefully chosen. At the school, Louis learned to read. The books that were given to the
boys had letters that were raised above the rest of the page. The blind boys used their fingers to
feel ___7___ so that they could slowly read what was written on the page. The letters were large
so that they could be felt easily. The books were thick and heavy. ___8___ to read the books
because the blind person had to slowly feel the shape of each letter and there were many letters in
a word and in a sentence. So, a ___9___ person could read only at a slow speed.
Louis kept thinking of a way to help blind people read more quickly. He heard about a method
which used raised dots and dashes instead of letters. ___10___ was so useful that it was used by
army officers at night. By using this method of raised dots and dashes, the soldiers could read
messages fairly quickly in the dark. This gave Louis the idea of using dots for his alphabet.
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