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Arch Ophthalmol. 2004;122:444.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 145 words of the full text and any section headings.

In the early 1820s, Louis Braille developed and published a system of dots to represent letters, numbers, mathematical symbols, and musical notes. Braille himself was blind from trauma and subsequent sympathetic ophthalmia at age 3. When he was a child at the school for the blind in Paris, France, Braille learned a phonetic system of raised dots and dashes that had been developed by a French army captain for soldiers to compose and read messages at night. As a teenager, Braille refined this technique of tactile writing into a succinct 6-dot system of the alphabet. Each letter of the alphabet is represented as a combination of dots and spaces in a rectangle of 6 cells containing 2 columns and 3 rows. Our cover provides representational examples, modified for print, of Braille's method and also serves as a visual portal for this issue's special theme: blindness.

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