Braille Translator

How braille works

A braille cell has six dot positions in two columns of three, numbered 1, 2, 3 down the left and 4, 5, 6 down the right. Louis Braille, blind from early childhood, published the system in 1829, building on Charles Barbier’s “night writing”, a raised-dot code meant to be read without light.

The first ten letters, a to j, use only the top four dots. k to t repeat them with dot 3 added, and u, v, x, y and z add dots 3 and 6. w is the odd one out, because French had no w when the code was made.

Capitals, numbers and punctuation

Braille has no separate capital letters. The capital indicator ⠠ (dot 6) comes before a capital letter, and two of them come before a word in capitals. The numeric indicator ⠼ (dots 3, 4, 5, 6) turns a to j into the digits 1 to 0 until the next space, and if one of those letters follows a number, the grade 1 indicator ⠰ shows it is a letter again. Punctuation has cells of its own: a full stop is ⠲ and a comma ⠂, so “Room 101.” is ⠠⠗⠕⠕⠍ ⠼⠁⠚⠁⠲.

Grade 1 and grade 2

This tool uses uncontracted braille, often called grade 1, where every letter is spelled out. Most braille books, signs and labels use contracted braille (grade 2), with short forms for common words and letter groups, so text from them won’t read back correctly here. Accents are dropped: é becomes e.

Braille on a screen

These are Unicode braille characters: pictures of the dots that you can copy and paste, not raised dots. Blind readers use screen readers and refreshable braille displays, which turn ordinary text into speech or braille by themselves, so to make a post accessible, write it in plain text. A screen reader may read pasted braille aloud cell by cell.

For a sign, a label or anything people will touch, have it produced and checked by a braille transcriber.