At the age of three, he wounded his right eye with a cobbler's tool while playing in his father's workshop. No medical knowledge could save his eyesight at that time. Louis's left eye became inflamed, apparently due to subsequent sympathetic ophthalmia, and he eventually lost the sight in that eye.

Upon receiving a scholarship, he went in 1819 to Paris to attend the National Institute for Blind Children, and from 1826 he taught there.

Although ill health forced him to retire in 1850, Dufau agreed to keep him on at the Institute in exchange for giving piano lessons from time to time as his health allowed. Louis Braille died on January 6th, 1852, two days after his 43rd birthday. His body was taken to Coupvray and buried in the local cemetery.