Barbier intended his raised-point phonetic writing as universal literacy for everyone excluded by the education system — farmers, artisans, the urban poor, the deaf — not for blind readers alone

Beyond correcting the soldier-code origin myth (claim-barbier-night-writing-designed-for-blind-not-soldiers), Philippa Campsie's account describes Charles Barbier's ambition as broader than blindness. His raised-point phonetic system — a way of writing sounds rather than spelling — was conceived as a simplified literacy tool for the full range of people the formal education system left behind: "farmers, artisans, the urban poor, deaf people, all those left behind by the education system." Tactile raised-point type for blind readers was one application of a general project to lower the barrier to reading and writing.

The two framings are compatible rather than contradictory: Barbier designed the raised-point modality specifically for blind readers (the point the myth-correction turns on), while the wider phonetic-writing project aimed at mass literacy across many excluded groups. Read together, this makes Barbier's work an early instance of what would much later be called universal or inclusive design — a single accommodation intended from the outset to serve many kinds of users — roughly 150 years before the vocabulary for it existed.

The neighboring facts from the same source are the myth-correction above and the corrected Braille–Barbier chronology at claim-braille-barbier-first-met-1833-after-braille-published. The disability-and-improvised-systems thread this joins is anchored by claim-blind-mathematicians-independently-reinvented-private-notation and claim-saunderson-palpable-arithmetic-tactile-calculating-device.