About
About BrailleChart
A complete braille reference built to be correct first and fast second.
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.
Five codes are published here — Unified English Braille, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic and Hindi — and each lives in its own section with its own tables. They are never mixed: a cell is looked up in the code of the page you are on. Every other language's braille assigns the cells differently again, and is not covered.
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 to count that a tool was used — which tool and which braille code, never a character of what you typed. That is the only third-party script this site adds, it is absent from the embeddable widget, and there is nothing else: no advertising network, no session recording, no cross-site tracking. Cloudflare's bot detection also injects a browser-profiling script into every page, which this site does not control and which the privacy page describes rather than glosses over.
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.
Every cell diagram on this site — the picture on each letter, number, contraction and phrase page — is CC BY 4.0 as well. Use them in a worksheet, a slide, a video or a print-out, commercially or not, and credit BrailleChart. Each one has a download link under it, and every one is drawn from the same verified tables the rest of the page is measured against, so the dots in the picture are the dots in the code.
Get in touch
Corrections are the most useful thing anyone can send. If a cell, a rule or a contraction is wrong here, it is worth more to know than anything else on this page — write to contact@braillechart.com.
If you read braille, and especially if you transcribe it or teach it, I would like to hear from you. This site is verified against liblouis and the BANA formats manual, which catches wrong output but cannot tell me whether any of it is actually useful — whether the practice drill teaches in a sensible order, whether the cells read well under a screen reader, whether the tone lands. Nobody who reads braille has looked at it. One sentence would be more than I have now.