Louis Braille's birthday is January 4, 1809.  Louis Braille (1909-1852) is the inventor of the Braille system for tactile reading, where the vingers are moved over patterns of raised dots to enable reading by the blind.

The vOICe approach instead focusses on representing live camera views of the 3D environment in sound, to enable the blind to "see" their environment via sound. As such, it aims to provide synthetic vision to the totally blind by means of a non-invasive visual prosthesis. The ultimate goal is to include truly visual sensations by exploiting the neural plasticity of the human brain. The vOICe uses pitch for height and loudness for brightness in a left to right scan of any view. Stereo panning is used to further enhance perception of the left to right view scanning. The vOICe auditory display approach is one of several novel approaches towards sensory substitution (vision substitution) for the totally blind. However, unlike Braille it is not targetted at reading text, although it may be complemented by OCR (Optical Character Recognition).