American Foundation for the Blind York City headquarters. Louis Braille was the Frenchman who invented the raised dot code that bears his name. On January 4, 2009, the 200th anniversary of his birth, AFB created an online gallery that includes pictures of him and digitized books and articles. AFB's main headquarters is in Arlington, Virginia. Other offices include New York City; Dallas, Texas; and Huntington, West Virginia. In 2012, AFB added VisionAware to its family of sites in partnership with the "Reader's Digest" Partners for Sight Foundation. The site folded in content from AFB's Senior Site, with new information and resources for adults of all
Louis Braille its form and maximizing its efficiency. He made uniform columns for each letter, and he reduced the twelve raised dots to six. He published his system in 1829, and by the second edition in 1837 he had discarded the dashes because they were too difficult to read. Crucially, Braille's smaller cells were capable of being recognized as letters with a single touch of a finger. Braille created his own raised-dot system by using an awl, the same kind of implement which had blinded him. In the process of designing his system, he also designed an ergonomic interface for using it,