This year marks the 200th anniversary of braille. You may have noticed braille on elevator buttons or hotel room number plates. It is the raised dots, or tactile code, through which blind and low vision individuals read. 

Whereas sighted individuals read text by seeing the shape of the letters, blind individuals read by sensing the shape of the braille cells with their fingertips. Braille is hence not a language, but a code, converting language from visual to tactile form.

Braille exists in the background of a largely sighted society. Take a guess: what percent of blind people today know braille? Inconsistent definitions of and data on braille literacy makes identifying a precise figure challenging. Nonetheless, in the U.S., the estimate is around 10-25%. In the U.K., it is around 7%. Elsewhere around the world, it is even lower. The rise of text-to-speech and speech-to-text systems has enabled reduced reliance on braille. This is nothing short of a braille literacy crisis.

Why braille still matters in today’s audio age

Given the advancement of audio-based alternatives, you may wonder: Why is the low braille literacy rate a problem? One answer is that braille literacy is literacy, period. As one teacher of the visually impaired I spoke to said, “If the literacy rate among sighted people were 25%, would that be acceptable?” She pointed out the lower standards unjustly set for blind individuals.

While audio can replace braille in simple tasks, it falls short on many important areas. Imagine learning math through audio only, for example. A sample textbook may read aloud, “Open parenthesis three x squared minus five x plus eight close parenthesis to the power of four.” That’s a lot of information to hold in mind as you listen. Unfortunately, many blind individuals are taught that way. One blind man I interviewed recalled his high school days and exclaimed, “Learning calculus through audio tapes was the worst!” Learning braille can hence be a gateway to advanced education and careers in STEM fields, and the financial security they may provide. 

Besides STEM fields, braille literacy matters in other areas like spelling, punctuation and grammar — as well as deeper reading comprehension. Braille also supports the privacy, independence and safety of blind individuals in a way that audio cannot. Messaging in public via voice-over or dictation reduces blind persons’ privacy. Using audio in loud environments is impractical, and wearing earbuds constantly is a safety concern; blind individuals need to listen to their physical surroundings to safely navigate. 

In our discussions with stakeholders in the blind community, a set of staggering statistics kept coming up. Only around 30% of blind adults in the U.S. are employed. For braille-readers, that figure is around 85%. This demonstrates the economic and personal costs of our low braille literacy rates. 

The systematic causes of low braille literacy

Given braille’s importance, why are braille literacy rates so abysmally low? This has been a focus of our Lean Launchpad team at Stanford. We are an interdisciplinary team across the sighted spectrum and from backgrounds across engineering, policy and business. To deeply understand and develop promising solutions to the braille literacy crisis, we interviewed 106 stakeholders in the blind community. Across these interviews, a picture of a systematic issue emerged.

First, braille is often not introduced early to children with low vision. If such a student has some residual vision left, their teacher may push them to use vision- or audio-based tools (such as magnifiers, screen readers), which are more familiar to the teacher than braille. However, this does a disservice to students with progressive vision loss, who become blind within years; learning braille in adulthood is harder. A low-vision child may not advocate for themselves, or even have adults in their lives willing to do so. As a braille instructor I interviewed told us, “People who are losing their vision really struggle learning braille because they’re in denial. There’s a lot of psychology involved.”

Second, even when braille is taught, it is done so infrequently. Many blind students receive only an hour of weekly instruction. “One hour a week is not enough to learn anything meaningful,” a leader in the blind community told us. Blind individuals seeking to learn braille on their own also face challenges, such as low motivation, time constraints, and limited availability of learning materials, especially for adult learners. 

Third, braille instruction quality is hit-or-miss. While some interviewees said they had braille-proficient teachers who inspired them, too many others highlighted negative experiences where their teachers framed braille as difficult to learn.

Resource constraints underlie these challenges. Print braille books are costly and inconveniently large (the full Bible in print braille can take up over six feet of shelf space!). Braille displays, which convert digital text onto refreshable braille cells, cost thousands of dollars. Public funding for these resources follows a burdensome and uncertain process.

“The number of letters I have to write and statistics I have to cite… having to go through that process causes people to give up,” one blind college student told us.

There is also a severe shortage of trained teachers for the visually impaired. Meanwhile, several schools for the blind and services for braille-learning are closing. Blindness is a low-incidence condition. In the US, around 640,000 individuals (or 0.2% of the US population) have blindness, and around 6.7 million have moderate-to-severe vision loss. Hence, amid resource constraints, blind students fall through the cracks, underserved and overlooked.

A vision for a better future 

These drivers of the braille literacy crisis are not inevitable. While organizations importantly seek increased resources for blind individuals, there are opportunities for improved resourcefulness in teaching braille. The question of braille’s relevance in the age of Alexa often pits technology against braille. However, technology can supplement rather than supplant braille-learning. 

EdTech entrepreneurs are developing engaging ways to teach subjects like math and coding. Braille education, too, is ripe for disruption. Even 200 years after the invention of braille, braille is not a relic of the past, but a key to blind individuals’ future.

Maha Al Fahim is a second-year MBA student at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Her Lean Launchpad research team comprises Anna Filochowska MBA ’24, Adil Jussupov M.S. ’23, Gene Sung-Ho Kim ’25 and David Madey M.S. ’25.