New York Point

A tactile reading system for the blind, designed by sighted educator William Bell Wait and adopted by the American Association of Instructors of the Blind in 1871. It used a variable-width cell — two dots high, one to four dots wide — rather than Braille's fixed six-dot cell, an information-density optimization that came at the cost of a cumbersome capital-letter encoding. It was New York Point's losing side of the "War of the Dots," the century-long (1871-1932) US contest that this vault has since traced down to the institutional level: which specific schools held out, which switched, and what switching cost the people who did it.

References

• claim-william-bell-wait-sighted-designer-of-new-york-point
• claim-war-of-the-dots-competing-braille-systems-1829-1932
• claim-1871-1932-braille-standards-war-fought-institution-by-institution-not-fixed-lines
• claim-nemeth-ueb-split-is-a-notation-convention-not-a-competing-script-dispute
• Captures: 10-inbox/raw/2026-07-09-hop-braille-standards-war-echo.md, 10-inbox/raw/2026-08-22-do-current-us-state-level-nemeth-vs-ueb.md