Braille, properly explained

Braille chart, alphabet and translator

Every cell as real dots with its dot numbers, and a Grade 2 translator that publishes how often it is wrong instead of only claiming to be right.

Open the translator Learn the alphabet

The braille alphabet chart

All 26 letters. Each cell is drawn as real dots, sized the way they appear under a fingertip, with its dot numbers underneath. Follow any letter for how that cell is built and which letters it is confused with.

Printable chart with numbers and punctuation Numbers

It shows its work

Every braille site says it is accurate. This one publishes the measurement, the method behind it, and the words it still gets wrong, so you can decide how far to trust it rather than taking the claim.

99.7% exact, and the misses listed

Checked cell for cell against the reference translator on every build, over the 5,000 commonest English words. All 14 disagreements are in a table, with what went wrong in each.

Rules measured over 11,014 words

A contraction may sit inside a longer word where the letters keep their meaning, which spelling cannot decide. So it was surveyed against the reference, and the survey is published rather than summarised.

The finder says why

For any word you type: which contractions applied, which were legal and passed over for a shorter spelling, and which rule forbade the rest, in words rather than in cells.

Dot numbers on every cell, the tables as JSON, and page text under CC BY 4.0 — so any claim here can be checked against a source you already trust. All four measurements are written up, each with the data it came from.

Start here

Text to braille

Grade 1 or Grade 2, shown as dots, Unicode characters or dot numbers.

Braille to text

Paste braille characters or type dot numbers and read it back as plain text.

Which contractions apply?

Paste a word and see which Grade 2 contractions fired, which were passed over, and which a rule forbade.

What is this cell?

Reverse lookup: choose the dots you can see or feel and get every reading of that cell.

How many braille pages?

Paste a document and get its page count in both grades, laid out the way it is embossed.

Printable chart

The full alphabet, numbers and punctuation on one page, laid out to print cleanly.

Grade 2 contractions

Every wordsign and groupsign, with the rules about where each one may be used.

Your name in braille

Any name rendered as dots, with each letter broken down.

Practice

Drill the cells until you recognise them whole instead of counting dots.

Common questions

Whether the output is safe to emboss, why numbers look like letters, and what a screen reader makes of it.

How the code is built

The alphabet is not arbitrary. It is three groups of ten, and once you see the pattern there are really only ten shapes to learn.

Decade 1

The ten base shapes, built from dots 1, 2, 4 and 5 only.

abcdefghij

Decade 2

Decade 1 with dot 3 added to every cell.

klmnopqrst

Decade 3

Decade 2 with dots 3 and 6 added.

uvxyz

The exception

w breaks the pattern. Louis Braille built the code for French, which had no letter w, so w was added later and does not follow decade 3. It is dots 2-4-5-6.

Braille is not one code

Everything above is Unified English Braille. Spanish and Portuguese braille are different codes that happen to share the same 26 letters — and after that they diverge: the capital sign, the full stop, the brackets and the decimal comma are all different, and each has letters of its own that are one cell where UEB spends three.

Spanish adds seven such letters and Portuguese thirteen. Every one of the seven lands on a cell UEB has already given to a contraction — that is why the codes cannot be mixed, and it is the part no chart shows you:

Seven cells, two codes, two different readings
Cell	In Spanish braille	In UEB
	the letter á	the letters of inside a word, and the word “of” alone
	the letter é	the letters the inside a word, and the word “the” alone
	the letter í	the letters st inside a word, and the word “still” alone
	the letter ñ	the letters er inside a word
	the letter ó	the letters ing inside a word
	the letter ú	the letters with inside a word, and the word “with” alone
	the letter ü	the letters ou inside a word, and the word “out” alone

Nor do the two of them agree with each other. Portuguese and Spanish write á, í, ó, ú and ü with the same cells and part company on é — six dots in Portuguese, four in Spanish — and ã, õ, â, ê, ô and ç have no Spanish equivalent at all. A number is a different length in the two: Portuguese holds the number sign open through a decimal comma, where Spanish closes and reopens it.

Both sections have a page per letter, the numbers, the punctuation, a printable chart, a translator and a published measurement — each checked against the reference translator on every build and matching it exactly, 100.00% and 100.00%.

Español: braille en español · el alfabeto · la medición
Português: braille português · o alfabeto · a medição