Vanessa Warne is the author of By Touch Alone: Blindness and Reading in Nineteenth-Century Culture. Supplied by Vanessa Warne

For many readers today, braille is synonymous with blind literacy. But for Vanessa Warne, the story of how blind people learned to read provided a deeper look at the cultural history of disability itself.

Warne, a professor in the U of M department of English, theatre, film and media, studied how people in the 19th century understood disability. Her work explored the connections between poems, novels, paintings, sculptures and the history of blind readers who navigated the world through touch rather than sight.

Her interest in disability history began nearly two decades ago, after a colleague encouraged her to volunteer at the Canadian National Institute for the Blind. Warne spent her time in the organization’s recording studio, reading aloud everything from young adult novels to recipes that were not available in accessible formats.

The experience left a lasting impact on her. “The recording studio closed but I kept thinking about access to literature, including the history of 19th century blind people’s access to works of literature that I love and teach,” she said. “The more I learned about this understudied history, the more I wanted to know.”

That curiosity has culminated in her new book, By Touch Alone: Blindness and Reading in Nineteenth-Century Culture, published this summer. The book traces the history of the first generation of blind readers who became literate through inkless, tactile books created to be read by touch. Warne explained that while braille is widely recognized today, it was once just one of several tactile reading systems. “These inkless scripts both felt and looked very different from braille,” she noted. “Studying these now obsolete scripts taught me a great deal about how ableist attitudes toward disabled people have shaped technology and culture,” she added.

Alongside the technical and historical aspects, Warne examined how sighted people responded when blind readers entered literary culture. As reading by touch became more common, sighted contemporaries had to reconsider what qualified as literacy and rethink long-held assumptions about blindness. Her research brings together life writing from blind authors with the fiction, paintings and sculptures produced by sighted artists, revealing a more complex and culturally contested history of reading than many expect.

While her work is rooted in reading practices, Warne noted the influence of tactile literacy extended far beyond books. She found unexpected connections between reading by touch and other 19th-century cultural activities, from handling museum specimens to practices of tactile graffiti. These insights have shaped her upcoming research, which shifts focus from reading to the material history of blind craftsmanship. Many schools and asylums for blind students historically paired literacy education with craft training, producing baskets and other hand-made items intended both for income and rehabilitation.

Warne also saw contemporary relevance in her work, particularly as debates continue over accessibility, digitization and the future of braille. With 2024 marking the 200th anniversary of braille’s invention, she said ongoing cultural investment in braille, both in teaching and publishing may be declining as digital tools expand. She hopes the history of reading by touch will help today’s blind readers reflect on “how different modes of accessing text, such as touching raised text or listening to audio […] facilitate different kinds of engagement or support different degrees of comprehension.”

Warne hopes her work will contribute to richer understandings of disability history and encourage students to explore the vast cultural archive of the 19th century. “The Victorians wrote and published and painted and sculpted and crafted astounding amounts of cultural material,” she said. “We can learn a lot about them and about our own cultural moment by studying the things they created and collected.”

Warne’s work has been supported by U of M Libraries’ Archives & Special Collections, which houses rare 19th century tactile books. She recalled travelling with some of these volumes and offering blind readers the opportunity to handle scripts they had never encountered in their lifetimes. One moment stayed with her — exploring a 150-year-old book printed in William Moon’s tactile script with a disability activist who had only ever read braille. “I’m grateful for the chance to share these rare books and their history with readers today, both blind and sighted,” Warne said.