How blind people read

Our teacher showed us a special book which blind people can read.  We were very surprised when she opened up the book to show us the words and all we could see was white paper!  When we looked closer we could see hundreds of tiny raised dots on the pages.  We learnt that blind people have their own special alphabet called Braille and that they use their fingertips to 'read' the dots.  Every dot represents an alphabet letter, number or indicates a punctuation mark.  Proficient Braille users can read the dots just as fast as a sighted person can read words! 

Each of the Braille characters is made up of a combination of between 1 to 6 dots.  (More recently, some characters have been added and are made of up to 8 dots.)  You can learn the meaning of the Braille dots at various websites including http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braille 

Braille was invented by a blind Frenchman Louis Braille in 1825.