Braille Translator

How braille works

Every braille character is one cell of six dot positions, arranged as two columns of three and numbered 1, 2, 3 down the left and 4, 5, 6 down the right. Any dot can be raised or flat, which gives 64 possible cells including the empty one used as a space. That is fewer than the number of characters a language needs, which is why braille leans on prefix signs rather than inventing more shapes. Louis Braille settled on six dots in 1824 for a practical reason: six is about as many dots as a fingertip can take in without moving.

Capital letters and numbers

There is no separate capital alphabet. A capital sign, dot 6 on its own, goes immediately before a letter to make it a capital, so a name takes one extra cell. Numbers reuse the first ten letters: a number sign, dots 3456, switches the reading so that a to j become 1 to 9 and 0. That switch lasts until a space or a letter ends it, which is why 123 needs only one number sign but writing 1 and 2 as separate words needs two.

Grade 1 and Grade 2

This translator produces Grade 1, also called uncontracted braille, where every letter is written out. It is what beginners learn and what labels and short signs normally use. Grade 2 adds around 180 contractions, so that whole words like knowledge shrink to a single cell and common groups like ing and the get signs of their own. Grade 2 is what most published books use because it saves considerable space, but its rules depend on context and pronunciation, so it is a much larger system than a letter for letter substitution.

What this output is and is not

What you get back is Unicode braille characters, the same ones used to show braille on screen. They are the correct dot patterns and can be pasted anywhere, but a printed page of these characters is not readable by touch. Physical braille needs an embosser, which presses raised dots into heavy paper at a fixed size and spacing. Use this to learn the code, to check a transcription or to label something on screen, and use an embosser or a braille display for anything meant to be read with fingers.

Worth knowing

• Paste braille into the box and it is detected automatically, no need to change the direction.
• Turn on dot numbers to see each cell written the way braille charts describe it.
• The bracket sign, dots 2356, is shared by brackets and quotation marks, so reading it back gives one of them.
• Accented letters are folded to their base letter, because English braille has no cell for them.
• Nothing is stored. The translation runs on our server and the text is discarded once it is sent.