Decoder
Braille to text
Paste Unicode braille characters, or type dot numbers like 145-15-123-123-135, and read it back as plain text.
Text
The decoded text will appear here.
Why decoding is not always certain
Reading braille back into text is not perfectly reversible. Dots 2-3-6 is both a question mark and an opening quotation mark. In Grade 2 the same cell can be a whole word in one position and a letter group in another, and without the original text there is no way to be sure which was meant.
The decoder resolves these the commonest way and gets ordinary text right. Treat an odd-looking result as ambiguity in the code rather than a mistake in your input.
If you are decoding something contracted — a book, a sign — switch to Grade 2. Leaving it on Grade 1 will spell out contraction cells as single letters and the result will look like nonsense. The contraction list shows which cells behave this way, and the translator goes the other direction, from text into braille.
This decoder wants a passage. For a single cell you are stuck on — one you can feel but cannot name — the dot-number lookup takes the raised dots and gives back every reading that cell has, which is usually more than one.