You see it every day when you pull out a banknote from your wallet. You see it when you take a ride in a lift.

You probably don’t know what it means, but you are familiar with the feel of raised dots arranged in specific patterns when you run your fingers over them.

But while you can see them, you can’t read them – and that’s exactly the point, as they are meant for people who cannot see.

For many, many centuries, perhaps a millennium, blindness condemned people to a life where learning was near impossible.

With so much of humanity’s knowledge printed in books, the visually impaired were often left with no other learning materials.

This often resulted in blind people having to beg on the streets to survive, and only a very privileged few were able to secure an education of any kind.

But it took a tragic accident befalling a young French boy named Louis Braille for things to change for the better.

Despite being born a healthy baby in 1809 during a particularly turbulent time when Napoleonic France was at war against most of Europe, Brailler’s lifelong battle began at home.

The year was 1812, and young Louis found his way into his father’s workshop and toolbox. One thing led to another and the young child accidentally stabbed himself in the eye with a stitching awl.

Not only did he lose his sight in the injured eye, but the infection from that eye spread to the other and he was completely blind by the age of five.

Despite this unfortunate turn of events, Braille’s family remained supportive and he actually lived a relatively normal life and was sent to school to earn himself an education.

He was a good student, but unsurprisingly, found it hard to learn solely through listening. But even then, he managed to earn a scholarship to the Royal Institution for Blind Youth in Paris when he was ten.

At the time, books for the blind did exist, but they used a writing system that had large letters protruding out of the paper.

While readable, it was not practical as it took too long for a person to trace every single letter.

Braille then started exploring the possibility of a better writing system to replace it.

As it happened, during the Napoleonic Wars, a French captain named Charles Barbier came up with a way to encode military letters, which couldn’t be read by simply anyone.

He did this by poking holes into a paper, which produced a message that could only be read by running one’s fingertips over the paper.

While his idea never took off during the war, it inspired Braille to try his hand at designing his own writing system.

He simplified Barbier’s idea and created a system that had raised dots arranged in a pattern – all within a grid of two columns and three rows.

Ironically, Braille used an awl to create his raised dots. The same tool that caused his blindness was also helping him overcome it.

Perhaps the most important aspect of this new system was that the letters were small and a single fingertip was all that was necessary to be able to feel and read them.

By the time he was done perfecting his system, Braille was just 15 and once he had graduated from school, he returned to teach other visually impaired people like him.

Despite the brilliance of his writing system, it was not implemented immediately but its popularity slowly but surely grew as its simplicity allowed its use in the teaching of mathematics, science and music.

Unfortunately, Braille succumbed to tuberculosis at the age of 43. His death came two years before he was recognised by the French government and his school started teaching his writing system to students.

Today, visually impaired people around the world are taught to read Braille, which has been adapted for over 130 languages.

Braille’s legacy has not been forgotten, as a century after his death, his remains were interred in Paris’ Pantheon, a mausoleum for the most distinguished of French citizens.

And in a symbolic gesture, his hometown asked to keep his hands, where they remain buried near his childhood home.

Since January is Braille Literacy Month, it may be a good time to just be thankful that knowledge is now available for everyone to enjoy, for both the seeing and the blind.