Louis Braille invented his reading system as a blind teenager, before he was even 16

Blinded at age 3 in a workshop accident, Braille encountered a French army 'night writing' code of raised dots as a student in Paris. He spent his teens reworking it into a compact six-dot cell, presenting the system in 1824 at age fifteen that still bears his name today.

— C. Michael Mellor, Louis Braille: A Touch of Genius — National Braille Press, 2006
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