Tool
Your name in braille
Type any name and see it as braille cells, with every letter broken down and the dot numbers written out.
Your name will appear here as braille cells.
Names are always Grade 1
Names are written uncontracted, letter by letter, even in a Grade 2 document. A contraction inside a name would change how it is read — "Ben" is not "But-e-n" — so proper nouns are spelled out.
The first letter takes a capital sign, dot 6, placed immediately before it. A name in full capitals takes two capital signs before the word.
Count the cells before you order. Names run longer in braille than people expect, because the capital sign is an extra cell that does not correspond to any printed letter. The bracelet maker lays this out as a bead pattern.
How long common names run
Every name below is one cell longer than its letter count, because of the capital sign. That is the number that matters when you are ordering something with a fixed amount of space — a bracelet, a pendant, a label.
| Name | Letters | Cells | In braille |
|---|---|---|---|
| Emma | 4 | 5 | |
| Oliver | 6 | 7 | |
| Sophia | 6 | 7 | |
| James | 5 | 6 | |
| Charlotte | 9 | 10 | |
| Noah | 4 | 5 | |
| Amelia | 6 | 7 | |
| William | 7 | 8 | |
| Isabella | 8 | 9 | |
| Henry | 5 | 6 | |
| Mia | 3 | 4 | |
| Alexander | 9 | 10 | |
| Grace | 5 | 6 | |
| Benjamin | 8 | 9 | |
| Chloe | 5 | 6 | |
| Thomas | 6 | 7 | |
| Hannah | 6 | 7 | |
| Michael | 7 | 8 | |
| Sarah | 5 | 6 | |
| Daniel | 6 | 7 | |
| Ava | 3 | 4 | |
| Lucas | 5 | 6 | |
| Zoe | 3 | 4 | |
| Muhammad | 8 | 9 |
Your own name will follow the same rule. Type it into the tool above, or work it out from the alphabet — every letter page shows the cell and its dot numbers.
If your name has an accent, “in braille” has three answers
An accented letter is one cell in Spanish and Portuguese braille and three in Unified English Braille — a prefix, an accent mark, then the base letter. So the same name is a different length depending on which braille it is written in, and on a bracelet that is the difference between fitting and not.
It goes further than length. José is five cells in both Spanish and Portuguese, and they are not the same five: the é is dots 2-3-4-6 in Spanish and dots 1-2-3-4-5-6 in Portuguese. A Spanish reader and a Portuguese reader would each read the other's version as a different letter.
| Name | Common in | English braille | Spanish braille | Portuguese braille |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| José | Spanish and Portuguese | 7 | 5 | 5 |
| María | Spanish | 8 | 6 | 6 |
| João | Portuguese | 7 | not in this code | 5 |
| Iñaki | Spanish | 8 | 6 | not in this code |
| Antônio | Portuguese | 10 | not in this code | 8 |
| Inés | Spanish | 7 | 5 | 5 |
| Zoë | English | 6 | not in this code | not in this code |
The answer is the code the person reading it uses, not the language the name came from. A Spanish name on a card for an English braille reader should be written in English braille — they will read the Spanish version as different letters entirely. If you are not sure, the safest choice is the reader's own code. Spanish and Portuguese have their own translators here, each checked against the reference implementation on every build.
The tool at the top of this page writes English braille. It will tell you if a character has no English spelling rather than dropping it silently.