Braille Translator

Common questions

What is the difference between Grade 1 and Grade 2 braille, and which is this?

This is Grade 1, also called uncontracted braille: every letter, digit and punctuation mark gets its own cell, in the order you wrote them. Grade 2 is the contracted braille of published books, where common words and letter groups collapse into single cells, so “the” becomes one cell instead of three. Grade 1 is what beginners learn, what labels and signs usually carry, and what you want when you are checking a word character by character. Nothing on this page contracts anything, which is why the cells here run longer than the same passage in an embossed book.

Why does a capital letter come out as two cells?

Because braille has no separate capital letters. A capital is written by putting the capital indicator, the single dot 6 cell ⠠, in front of the ordinary letter, so A is ⠠⠁: the indicator and then the a cell. The indicator applies to the one letter after it, so a word in capitals gets one in front of every letter here. Lower case needs nothing at all.

What is the ⠼ that appears before numbers?

It is the number sign, dots 3, 4, 5 and 6. The digits 1 to 9 and 0 are written with the same cells as the letters a to j, so something has to say which you mean: the number sign opens a run of digits and the first character that is not a digit closes it. 12 is ⠼⠁⠃, one number sign followed by the a and b cells. If a letter from a to j comes straight after a number with no space, it takes the letter sign ⠰ so it cannot be read as another digit. A comma or a full stop inside a number counts as a non-digit here, so 1,000 comes out as ⠼⠁⠂⠼⠚⠚⠚, with a fresh number sign after the comma: it reads as the same number and is more literal than a transcriber would write it.

Can this print or emboss real braille?

It produces the characters, not the dots. What you copy from here is ordinary Unicode text from the braille block, which pastes into a document, a message or a label template and can be sent to an embosser by software that drives one. Raised dots you can read by touch need an embosser or a slate and stylus. The print view on this page prints the source and the cells together in ink, which is what a sighted teacher, parent or labeller checks against, and it is not a substitute for embossed braille.

What happens to a character it has no braille cell for?

It is listed, with the position it sat at, and the cells that come out carry nothing in its place. Grade 1 English covers the twenty-six letters, the ten digits and eight punctuation marks: comma, semicolon, colon, full stop, exclamation mark, question mark, apostrophe and hyphen. Quotation marks, brackets, the slash, the ampersand and currency and maths signs are written in braille with two cells, and an opening quotation mark shares its dot pattern with the question mark, so they are reported here instead of being guessed at. Accented letters, other alphabets and emoji are reported the same way. Up to 20,000 characters are translated at a time, and anything longer is refused with its length rather than quietly cut short.

Can I paste braille cells and get the text back?

Yes. Switch the direction to braille to text and paste the cells in: the letters, digits and punctuation come back, capitals are restored from the indicator in front of them, and a blank cell or an ordinary space both read as a space. A cell this Grade 1 table does not know, including a contracted Grade 2 cell and the eight dot cells used for computer braille, stops the reading and names the position it is at, so nothing disappears without being mentioned.