About BrailleChart

Why this exists

Most braille tools online are a single input box on a page covered in ads, with no explanation of what the output means and no way to check whether it is right. The reference material is scattered across PDFs and institutional sites that are hard to search.

This site is the reference and the tools in one place, with the dot numbers always visible so you can verify any output against a published table.

How the tables are verified

Every braille cell on this site is derived from dot numbers at build time rather than typed as a character. A mistyped braille character is invisible to a sighted proofreader, so the build computes them instead.

The tables are checked by an automated test suite that asserts the alphabet against published Unified English Braille, verifies the decade structure the alphabet is built from, and round-trips text through translation and back. The build fails if any assertion fails.

What it does not do

Grade 2 output here covers wordsigns and groupsigns but not shortforms, initial-letter contractions or pronunciation-dependent rules. It is reliable for learning and for checking your own work. It is not a certified transcription service, and anything being embossed for someone to rely on should be checked by a qualified transcriber.

Arabic braille, and every other language's braille code, uses different cell assignments. This site covers Unified English Braille only.

Accessibility

Every braille cell carries a text description naming its raised dots, so a screen reader announces "dots 1, 4 and 5" rather than skipping past an image. Every reference table is real HTML with proper row and column headers. Nothing is conveyed by colour alone, the whole site works at 200% zoom, and every reference page works with JavaScript disabled — only the interactive tools need it, and they say so.

If something here is inaccessible, that is a bug and worth reporting.

Privacy

Every tool on this site runs entirely in your browser. Text you type into the translator, the name generator or the bracelet maker is never transmitted anywhere — there is no server to send it to.

Google Analytics is used to count visits and see which pages people find useful. That is the only third-party script on the site, it is absent from the embeddable widget, and there is nothing else: no advertising network, no session recording, no fingerprinting. Full detail on the privacy page.

Licence

The braille tables are facts and belong to everyone. The written explanations are CC BY 4.0 — reuse them with attribution. There is a JSON API if you want the data directly, and an embeddable translator if you want the tool on your own site.