Translator
Braille translator
Type or paste any English text to turn it into braille you can copy. Letters, numbers and punctuation are written in Unified English Braille; anything it has no spelling for, such as the rupee sign ₹ or an emoji, is named below the braille rather than dropped.
Checked against liblouis 3.39.0 (en-ueb-g2) over the 5,000 commonest English words: 99.98% of words come out identical. The one that does not is published, one by one.
Braille
Your braille will appear here.
A .brf is a formatted braille file, one ASCII byte per cell, 40 cells to a line, 25 lines to a page: an embosser prints it (ViewPlus), and a braille note taker or display reads it (Bookshare). Open it in a text editor and it looks like nonsense — that is correct.
What the translator does
Grade 1 converts letter by letter, using the 26 letter cells. Capitals get a capital sign (dot 6) in front. A run of capitals gets two, closed by the capitals terminator (dots 6, then 3) where lowercase letters follow in the same word, as in ABCs. A sign that is not a letter ends the run without one, so the S after the apostrophe in McDONALD'S takes a capital sign of its own. A pair before other lowercase letters, as in BSc, takes one sign each; and three or more words in capitals are written as one passage, opened with three capital signs and closed with the terminator. No contraction reaches across a capital sign. Numbers get a number sign (dots 3-4-5-6) once at the start of the run, after which the letters a to j read as the digits 1 to 9 and 0 — and a lowercase letter from a to j straight after a digit, or after a decimal point or comma inside the number, takes a letter sign, or it reads as another digit.
Grade 2 additionally applies contractions: one cell, or a few, standing for a whole word or a common letter group. Contraction rules are positional, so a standalone b means "but" while the b inside "table" stays a plain b. Grade 1 and Grade 2 compared sets out which one you actually want.
Going the other way — braille back into text — is what the decoder is for. If you only need to look a character up rather than convert a whole phrase, the printable chart has the whole code on one page.
Good enough to read, learn from, and check your work against. Not a substitute for a certified transcription — if the output is going to be embossed for someone to rely on, have a qualified transcriber check it.
- Compound words that are not on its list. Bridging is applied from a list, so a compound it has never seen — one coined last week, or a surname — is contracted straight through, which is what this engine did everywhere until 18 September 2026
- Context rules that depend on syllable boundaries or pronunciation
- Typeform indicators for bold, italic and underline
- Capitals choices the rulebook leaves to meaning (8.8.2): TVOntario is written in the default capitals word mode, not with Ontario kept whole, and OKd with single capitals
Questions and answers
How accurate is this braille translator?
Its Grade 2 output is measured against liblouis 3.39.0 (en-ueb-g2) over the 5,000 commonest English words: 99.98% identical, cell for cell. The one word it writes differently from the reference is published, with the reference's answer beside each one.
Does it do both Grade 1 and Grade 2 braille?
Yes. Grade 1 is uncontracted, one cell per letter. Grade 2 writes common words and letter groups in fewer cells. You can switch between them.
What can it translate?
Letters, numbers and punctuation are written in Unified English Braille; anything it has no spelling for, such as the rupee sign ₹ or an emoji, is named below the braille rather than dropped.
Related
Braille to text
The reverse: paste braille and read it back.
Contraction reference
Every wordsign and groupsign the Grade 2 setting uses.
Printable chart
Check the translator's output against the full table.
How this was measured
The method, the corpus, and the one word this translator writes differently from the reference.
Common questions
Whether the output is safe to emboss, and why numbers look like letters.