Made by: Charles George Herbermann
Date: 1913
This image shows the design problem before standardization: at least six competing embossed systems, including Boston Line Type, Moon Type, New York Point, and eventually Braille, each competing to become the way blind readers accessed print. American producers tended to favor systems built on Roman letterforms, reasoning that this kept blind readers closer to the sighted world, while others pushed simplified or fully arbitrary tactile alphabets shaped around what a fingertip could actually distinguish. That divide is itself a design argument: should accessible typography mimic the dominant system, or be redesigned from scratch around a different sense entirely?
Printing enabled this increase and also forced the eventual reckoning. Once tactile texts could be mechanically reproduced rather than hand-embossed one copy at a time, the question shifted from "can this be read by touch" to "which incompatible system becomes the infrastructure." Braille itself was adapted from a twelve-dot military cipher into a simpler six-dot cell, but it still took decades to win out over rivals like the ones pictured here; the first U.S. school to teach it exclusively didn't adopt it until 1860, roughly a quarter-century after it was finalized.
If we as designers ask ourselves how accessibility has shifted from afterthought to design standard, we notice several important things, such as the delay in teaching. Accessibility wasn't ignored; designers built competing prototypes, but without a mechanism to choose among them, readers remained fragmented across systems for decades. Standardization eventually traded away the formal variety of these hand-drawn embossed alphabets for a code with no visual relationship to print at all, gaining portability and speed in return, much like the earlier trade-off print itself made in that leap from illuminated manuscript to movable type. Accessibility becomes a real design standard, rather than a well-meant afterthought, only once someone accepts that trade-off.
