The comma in braille

How to recognise it

A single dot in the middle-left position. It is the smallest mark in the code and the easiest to miss under a finger moving quickly.

It is the letter a moved down a row

Take the cell for a and slide every dot down one position — dot 1 becomes dot 2, dot 4 becomes dot 5 — and you have the comma. Six of the eight single-cell marks were built this way, which means a reader who knows the first ten letters already knows the shapes and only has to remember they sit lower in the cell.

In a sentence

Here is the comma doing its job, written in Grade 1 so every letter has its own cell.

Bring bread, milk and eggs.

Try your own text in the translator, or paste braille into the decoder to read it back.

Marks it is confused with

These differ by a single dot. Punctuation is harder to tell apart than letters because the marks are small and sit low in the cell, so a missing dot is easy to miss.