France made me a Knight, and my mission is Braille!

France recently inducted Haben Girma, a Deafblind lawyer and author, into its Order of Arts and Letters, an honor she accepted as a tribute to Braille itself. She marked the moment with humor, joking that her knighthood comes with a guide dog and a keyboard instead of a traditional horse and sword, then used the platform to answer critics who call Braille outdated. A writing system barely two centuries old is young, she argued, especially next to ink, a tool thousands of years old that people who see still rely on every day. France's willingness to celebrate Braille's continuing power, she said, gives her hope that other communities will come to treasure it as well.

In her remarks, Haben made clear that Braille is not only how Blind People read but how they write and create. When she prepared the audiobook for her own memoir, the publisher's audio team assumed someone else would voice her words and offered to cast an actor to play her voice. She had to press for the chance to represent herself, and she won it by reading her Braille manuscript aloud, after which the team accepted that Blind People can produce their own audiobooks. Her experience exposes how much of the publishing world still treats Blind People as an audience for stories rather than creators who can write and voice their own work, an assumption that yields only when Blind People insist on being heard.

Haben also placed her honor within a long history of society underestimating Blind People. She recalled a Blind teenager in occupied France who turned the low expectations placed on him into cover, using the assumption that a Blind person posed no threat to help organize one of the era's largest youth resistance movements. When occupying soldiers finally searched his room, they found thousands of pages they could not read, because the notes were written in Braille. That young man, Jacques Lusseyran, later became a professor in the United States and kept relying on Braille throughout his career, showing how society has long underestimated Blind People at a cost to everyone, not only to the Blind People it dismisses.

Finally, Haben pointed to a gap in today's technology: artificial intelligence tools that read a photographed page of print with ease still fail when the same photograph shows a page of Braille. She called this a matter of priorities rather than engineering, since the underlying capability plainly exists for print, and she urged the schools, libraries, and institutions building these systems to advocate for Braille as they design them. That responsibility rests with Community Builders, because inclusion and access for Blind People are not products to be bought or handed off to others but shared responsibilities each of us owns personally and puts into practice together in every decision we make.

Watch the Video: France made me a Knight, and my mission is Braille!

By: Haben Girma