Decapoint, or ''raphigraphy'', was a tactile form of the

Latin script The Latin script, also known as Roman script, is an alphabetic writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae, in southern Italy ...

invented by

Louis Braille Louis Braille (; ; 4 January 1809 – 6 January 1852) was a French educator and the inventor of a reading and writing system, named braille after him, intended for use by visually impaired people. His system is used worldwide and remains virtua ...

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 Braille (Pronounced: ) is a tactile writing system used by people who are visually impaired, including people who are Blindness, blind, Deafblindness, deafblind or who have low vision. It can be read either on Paper embossing, embossed paper ...

. Each letter contained ten dots in the height and different dots in the width to produce the graphic form of print. 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 Pierre-François-Victor Foucault (1797–1871) was the inventor in 1843 of the first printing machine for braille, the decapoint. Life A pupil of the Institut National des Jeunes Aveugles, Foucault married Thérèse-Adèle Husson, a blind aut ...

, 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. This font was now named Raphigraphy (Raphigrafie or Raphigraphie). When the first typewriters were invented, they quickly replaced the complicated Raphigraphy or decapoint, despite the impossibility for the blind to read the writing of typewriters.

References

Louis Invents Decapoint
American Foundation for the Blind * Source

(French) ''Nouveau procede pour representer des points la forme meme des letters, les cartes de geographie, les figures de geometrie, les caracteres de musiques, etc., a l'usage des aveugles (New Method for Representing by Dots the Form of the Letters Themselves, Maps, Geometric Figures, Musical Symbols, etc., for Use by the Blind)'' * Th

by Louis Braille in 1839, character set worked up optically (German) {{braille Braille Tactile alphabets Writing systems introduced in 1839