Translator
Braille translator
Type or paste anything. Letters, numbers and punctuation are all supported.
Checked against liblouis 3.29.0 (en-ueb-g2) on every build over the 5,000 commonest English words: 99.7% of words come out identical. All 14 that do not are published, one by one.
Braille
Your braille will appear here.
A .brf is the file embossers and braille displays read: one ASCII byte per cell, 40 cells to a line, 25 lines to a page. 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, and a fully capitalised word gets two. 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 letter from a to j straight after a digit takes a letter sign, or it reads as another digit.
Grade 2 additionally applies contractions: single cells that stand for whole words or common letter groups. 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.
- A shortform buried inside an unrelated word (newsletter, aboutface, greatgrandmother) — the reference contracts about 600 of those from a list of individual words rather than by rule, and this engine spells them out instead: longer, but never a contraction that reads as the wrong word
- The last words where an initial-letter contraction must not be used inside them (money, reverse) — position removes most of these but not all, and what remains is about meaning rather than spelling
- Four abbreviations the reference gives a grade 1 indicator from a word list rather than a rule (blvd, bldg, llc, llb) — over the 8,624 dictionary words whose cells open with a shortform, those four are the only ones that get it, so there is no rule here to follow
- The groupsigns ed, er and ow standing alone as whole words, which the reference writes as a single cell while spelling out ar, en, gh and ing in the same position — this engine spells all of them out, which is longer and unambiguous
- Context rules that depend on syllable boundaries or pronunciation
- Typeform indicators for bold, italic and underline
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 all 14 words this translator writes differently from the reference.
Common questions
Whether the output is safe to emboss, and why numbers look like letters.