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How braille is written: slate, stylus, writer and embosser
Four tools write braille: the slate and stylus, the braille writer, the refreshable display and the embosser. The oldest of them still writes from right to left.
Slate and stylus
A slate is two hinged plates that clamp a sheet of paper. The stylus is pressed down through an opening in the upper plate and pushes the paper into a hollow in the lower one. The American Foundation for the Blind calls it the oldest braille writing method available, and describes the usual slate as four rows of 28 cells.
The dots come up on the far side of the paper, so the writer works backwards. “When writing braille with a slate and stylus, you move from right to left,” the American Printing House for the Blind explains, and each cell is mirrored: dots 1, 2 and 3 are in the right column, dots 4, 5 and 6 in the left.
A plastic slate and stylus kit with four lines of 28 cells is enough to practise the mirrored, right-to-left writing described above.
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What mirroring does to the alphabet
Mirror the 26 letters, as a slate writer must, and three things happen. These are computed from the cells.
- 3 letters do not change: c ⠉, g ⠛ and x ⠭. They are punched exactly as they are read.
- 8 letters swap in pairs: d with f, e with i, h with j and r with w. To write d, punch the shape you read as f.
- The other 15 become shapes that are not letters. To write z you punch the shape a reader knows as the word “the”.
| To write | Read as | Punch | Which a reader knows as |
|---|---|---|---|
| a | ⠁ dot 1 | ⠈ dot 4 | the opening cell of the two-cell signs @, $ and & |
| b | ⠃ dots 1-2 | ⠘ dots 4-5 | the opening cell of 5 initial-letter contractions |
| k | ⠅ dots 1-3 | ⠨ dots 4-6 | the opening cell of 5 final-letter contractions |
| l | ⠇ dots 1-2-3 | ⠸ dots 4-5-6 | the opening cell of 6 initial-letter contractions |
| m | ⠍ dots 1-3-4 | ⠩ dots 1-4-6 | the letters sh inside a word, and the word “shall” alone |
| n | ⠝ dots 1-3-4-5 | ⠫ dots 1-2-4-6 | the letters ed inside a word |
| o | ⠕ dots 1-3-5 | ⠪ dots 2-4-6 | the letters ow inside a word |
| p | ⠏ dots 1-2-3-4 | ⠹ dots 1-4-5-6 | the letters th inside a word, and the word “this” alone |
| q | ⠟ dots 1-2-3-4-5 | ⠻ dots 1-2-4-5-6 | the letters er inside a word |
| s | ⠎ dots 2-3-4 | ⠱ dots 1-5-6 | the letters wh inside a word, and the word “which” alone |
| t | ⠞ dots 2-3-4-5 | ⠳ dots 1-2-5-6 | the letters ou inside a word, and the word “out” alone |
| u | ⠥ dots 1-3-6 | ⠬ dots 3-4-6 | the letters ing inside a word |
| v | ⠧ dots 1-2-3-6 | ⠼ dots 3-4-5-6 | the number sign |
| y | ⠽ dots 1-3-4-5-6 | ⠯ dots 1-2-3-4-6 | the letters and inside a word, and the word “and” alone |
| z | ⠵ dots 1-3-5-6 | ⠮ dots 2-3-4-6 | the letters the inside a word, and the word “the” alone |
The braille writer
A mechanical braille writer has six keys, one for each dot, and a space key. The keys for a cell are pressed together, like a chord, and the machine embosses the whole cell in one stroke, from left to right and the right way round. For ⠮, the sign for “the”, that is the keys for dots 2, 3, 4 and 6 at once.
The Perkins Brailler, prototyped in 1941 and sold from 1951, has a guide of its own.
Refreshable displays
A refreshable display is a single row of cells, typically 18 to 80 of them, each made of six to eight pins that rise and fall to show a line of text from a computer or tablet (Paths to Literacy). It shows one line at a time.
Unicode numbers the two extra dots 7 and 8, and has a pattern for every combination of the eight, 256 in all, from U+2800 to U+28FF. The first 64 are the six-dot cells used everywhere on this site.
Embossers, and the file they read
An embosser is a printer for braille. The translator on this site saves its output as a .brf file, which ViewPlus calls “a widely used formatted Braille document” and its embosser driver sends straight to the embosser, and the format in which Bookshare offers its books for a braille note taker or refreshable display. It is plain text in which every cell is one ordinary character. The sentence “Hello, the children said.” in Grade 2 is
⠠⠓⠑⠇⠇⠕⠂ ⠮ ⠡⠝ ⠎⠙⠲
and in the file it is the 16 characters ,HELLO1 ! *N SD4.
| Cell | Meaning here | Character in the file |
|---|---|---|
| ⠠ | capital sign | , |
| ⠮ | the word “the” | ! |
| ⠡⠝ | the shortform for “children” | *N |
| ⠂ | comma | 1 |
| ⠲ | full stop | 4 |
The file is laid out for a page of 40 cells by 25 lines, the defaults of the North American formats standard (BANA Braille Formats, 2016). The page estimator counts how many such pages a text will take.
An error in an embossed page is an error someone reads with their fingers, so machine translation should be checked by a qualified transcriber first. How often this translator differs from the reference is measured and published.
Sources
- American Foundation for the Blind, “Slate and Stylus Video”, transcript.
- American Printing House for the Blind, “Learning to Braille with a Slate and Stylus”, 13 February 2024.
- S. Smith, “Braille Hand Movement and Refreshable Braille Displays”, Paths to Literacy.
- The Unicode Character Database, Braille Patterns block, U+2800 to U+28FF.
- Braille Formats: Principles of Print-to-Braille Transcription (2016), Braille Authority of North America.
- ViewPlus, “Printing BRF files to a ViewPlus Embosser”, support knowledge base.
- Bookshare, “How do I download books in Braille Ready Format (BRF)?”, help center.
Everything said here about which dots make which cell is computed from the tables this site’s translator uses, and checked before each change to the site.