Braille. Hands use a plastic marker and a stylus to write braille on a sheet of paper. The yellow marker is used to divide the page into a sequence of cells (letter spaces). A handheld stylus then punches a pattern of dots in each cell. Different patterns of dots represent letters, numbers and punctuation marks. The dots are embossed from the back of the paper, working in the reverse direction, and then are read from the face of the page in the normal reading direction. The braille writing and reading system was devised by the French teacher Louis Braille (1809-1852) to enable blind people to have access to written language. The dots are read by touch through the fingers.