Decapoint

Decapoint, or raphigraphy, was a tactile form of the Latin script invented by Louis Braille as a system that could be used by both the blind and sighted.It was published in 1839. Letters retained their linear form, and so were legible without training to the sighted, but the lines were composed of embossed dots like those used in braille.The reason for the development of this writing was that relatives of the students could not read braille.These letters were not easy for the blind to write because of their height of ten dots despite grid.It therefore did not take long for the blind friend of Louis Braille, Pierre-François-Victor Foucault, to build in 1841 the first apparatus, the Raphigraph, which could push all the points of one column of characters at the same time into the paper.
A sample of decapoint. The relative efficiency of braille can be seen, as the line at the bottom is the braille transcription for the first two lines of decapoint: je vous prie de commander une planche pour la grille ci-jointe
The decapoint alphabet, digits, and punctuation
Raphigraphe on view in museum in Finland.
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