Louis Braille, the inventor of the reading and writing system for the blind, was born exactly 200 years ago. I listened to an inspiring BBC podcast about him this morning. His genius was such that the system is used today unchanged, and allows the blind to read at some 120 words per minute. Braille invented his system at the age of 15, and died by the age of 43 of tuberculosis.
My personal interest is to make available the most complex mathematical material to the blind. It is for this reason I attended a conference recently, and recorded the presentations.
Fortunately, with modern technology automatic generation of mathematics in braille is possible. Specifically if we encode books and research papers in XML with MathML, then it is possible to generate braille automatically. MathML is something our company is particularly good at, and we are determined to achieve this goal soon, whether or not it is commercially viable.