You may not have heard of Sabriye Tenberken. I hadn’t. Unless you’re interested in Τіbеt studies and have a reason to learn Braille. It’s the combination of those two things that she’s now known for.

She’s got an interesting story, which I’ll sum up by pasting from Wikipedia:

Sabriye was born near Bonn, Germany, and she became gradually visually impaired and completely blind by the age of thirteen due to retinal disease. She studied Central Asian Studies at Bonn University. In addition to Mongolian and modern Chinese, she studied modern and classical Tibetan in combination with Sociology and Philosophy.

As no blind student had ever before ventured to enroll in this kind of studies, she could not fall back on the experience of previous students,so she developed her own methods of studying her course of studying. It was thus that a Tibetan Braille script for the blind was developed in 1992, which became the official script for the blind in Tibet.

Tenberken’s organisation, Braille Without Borders, is pretty damn cool. Their goal is to help educate visually impaired people in underdeveloped areas, which in many cases would involve creating a Braille script for the language of that area. With Τіbеtan Braille, it’s now the standard for the area. I’m a fan of standards when they allow for uniformity in education.

Unfortunately it’s somewhat difficult to find the full chart of Τіbеtan braille online. I even checked Tenberken’s book “My Path Leads to Tibet” on Google Books. No luck. If anyone has a chart that they can direct me to I’d love to see it.