Braille translator

Translates both ways in English or Spanish, contracts to grade 2, and lets you type the dots six keys at a time the way a Perkins does.

Direction Table

Grade

Your text

Result

12 cells

⠠⠓⠑⠇⠇⠕ ⠺⠕⠗⠇⠙

Cells per line

The PNG draws real dots instead of relying on a font. It is what to use when braille shows up as empty boxes for you, or when it is going into a label design whose application has no glyphs for the braille block.

Braille ASCII

,HELLO WORLD

The same thing in braille ASCII, which is what sits inside a .brf file and the only output on this page an embosser genuinely understands. Each of the 64 cells has had a one-character name since the 1960s, from when braille travelled down teleprinter lines that knew nothing about dots.

The dots, cell by cell

⠠

⠓

125

⠑

⠇

123

⠇

123

⠕

135

–

⠺

2456

⠕

135

⠗

1235

⠇

123

⠙

145

Write it the way a Perkins does

A Perkins Brailler has one key per dot and you press the whole cell at once, which is how braille is actually written. Here F D S are dots 1 2 3 and J K L are dots 4 5 6, because that is where your fingers already rest.

f 1

d 2

s 3

j 4

k 5

l 6

Holding: nothing

What about a photo of braille?

Not here, and it is worth saying before you waste time: this page translates dots that are already text, not images. Recognising braille in a photograph is computer vision — finding the grid, deciding which shadow is a raised dot and which is a flaw in the paper — and no browser ships with that.

What does exist: mobile braille-recognition apps, and the transcription services run by blindness organisations, which also have a person check the result. If a photo is what you have, that is the road.

For printing or embossing

The output is Unicode braille characters, so it copies and pastes anywhere. But pasting those dots into a document and sending it to an inkjet produces drawings of dots, not dots anyone can feel: raised print needs an embosser, which punches the paper from behind. That is what the download .brf button above is for — the format those machines read, already wrapped to the line width you chose.

The table, letter by letter

⠁

⠃

⠉

⠙

145

⠑

⠋

124

⠛

1245

⠓

125

⠊

⠚

245

⠅

⠇

123

⠍

134

⠝

1345

⠕

135

⠏

1234

⠟

12345

⠗

1235

⠎

234

⠞

2345

⠥

136

⠧

1236

⠺

2456

⠭

1346

⠽

13456

⠵

1356

Warning: Grade 2 is ambiguous cell by cell: the same shape is "ea" inside a word and a comma outside one. Going from braille back to text, this page prefers the letter reading where it cannot tell, so contracted text does not always come back identical. For anything that will be embossed, have a braille reader check it.

Generated right here, in your browser. What you type never leaves your device.

Keep going with Morse code translator Printable paper QR code generator Online ruler

Braille is not a language. It is a way of writing one, and the difference matters: there is English braille, Spanish braille, Arabic braille and mathematical braille, all built from the same six dots arranged in two columns of three. Six dots give 63 possible patterns plus the empty cell, and every braille system in the world is a different way of spending those 63.

This page writes both directions in two tables — Unified English Braille and Spanish — and contracts to grade 2 where that applies. It also lets you type the dots directly, six keys at a time, the way a Perkins Brailler works, because reading a braille chart and writing a braille cell are different skills and only one of them is usually offered.

What it will not do is read a photograph. That limit is stated plainly further down, along with what to use instead, because roughly a fifth of the people searching for a braille translator are holding a picture.

Manual

How to use it

1
Pick the direction

Text to braille converts what you type into braille cells. Braille to text goes the other way, and accepts Unicode braille characters pasted from anywhere.
2
Pick the table

UEB is the English standard used across the UK, US, Canada, Australia and elsewhere. The Spanish table adds the accented vowels, the diaeresis and ñ, which UEB has no cells for.
3
Choose grade 1 or grade 2

Grade 1 spells everything out letter by letter. Grade 2 uses contractions and is what published braille actually looks like. Grade 2 is English-only here, because Spanish braille is written uncontracted by convention.
4
Read the dot numbers underneath

Every cell is shown with the dots that make it, numbered 1 to 6. That row is the part worth looking at if you are learning: the shapes stop being arbitrary once you can see the numbering.
5
Try the six-key keyboard

Turn it on and F D S J K L become dots 1 2 3 4 5 6. Hold the keys for one cell, release them together, and the cell appears. It is how braille is written rather than looked up.
6
Set the line width before you copy

Embossed braille is laid out in fixed-width lines, conventionally 40 cells. The output wraps to whatever you set, so what you copy already has the shape the page will have.

In depth

Things worth keeping in mind

What the contractions actually save

Braille is bulky in a way that is hard to appreciate until you handle it. A cell is about six millimetres wide and the dots must be far enough apart to feel, so a page holds roughly a thousand characters against several thousand in print. A single novel becomes a shelf of volumes.

Grade 2 exists to fight that. Replacing "the" with one cell, "and" with one cell and "ing" with one cell removes about a quarter of the cells from ordinary English prose. The cost is a system a beginner cannot read, which is why grade 1 remains the starting point and why both are offered here.

Whole-word signs · a lone letter means a word: b is "but", y is "you"
Strong contractions · one cell anywhere: and, for, of, the, with
Groupsigns · letter pairs inside words: ch, sh, th, ing, ar, er
Positional signs · be, con, dis at the start; ea, bb, ff in the middle

Braille on things that are not paper

Most braille an ordinary person encounters is not in a book. It is on medicine boxes, where it has been required across the European Union since 2005; on lift buttons and handrails; on bank cards; and on the tactile paving at kerbs, which is not braille at all but is often assumed to be.

Those uses are almost always uncontracted and very short — a drug name, a floor number. That is worth knowing before contracting anything you are going to stick on an object: on a label, grade 2 saves nothing worth having and excludes readers who never learned it.

The six-key chord, and why it is worth learning

Looking a letter up in a chart and writing it are separate skills, and only the second one leads anywhere. On a Perkins Brailler, and on every refreshable braille display with an input keyboard, a cell is entered as a chord: all its dots at once, in one motion, at whatever speed your hand can manage.

The layout is the same everywhere because it follows the hand rather than the alphabet. The three fingers of the left hand cover dots 1, 2 and 3, the three of the right cover 4, 5 and 6, and the thumbs take the space bar. Learning the chords on a QWERTY keyboard transfers directly to the machine.

History

A soldier's code, cut in half by a fifteen-year-old

Louis Braille was three years old when he blinded himself in his father's harness workshop in Coupvray, east of Paris. An awl slipped; the injured eye became infected and the infection spread to the other. By five he could see nothing at all.

At the Institution Royale des Jeunes Aveugles in Paris, reading meant enormous embossed Latin letters pressed into paper — legible with enough patience, and impossible to write. Then in about 1821 an artillery officer named Charles Barbier presented the school with something different: écriture nocturne, night writing, a system of raised dots he had devised so soldiers could read orders in the dark without a lamp. His cell was twelve dots tall.

Braille, then twelve, saw immediately what was wrong with it. Twelve dots is taller than a fingertip, so reading it meant moving the finger up and down a single character instead of gliding along a line. By fifteen he had cut the cell to six dots — small enough to sit under one fingertip at rest — and published the system in 1829, revising it in 1837.

The institution did not welcome it. Sighted teachers could not read it, and a later director had the braille books destroyed and the system banned at the school, on the grounds that blind pupils should learn to read what everyone else read. The students kept using it anyway, in secret. France adopted braille officially in 1854, two years after Louis Braille died of tuberculosis at forty-three.

Standardisation took another century and a good deal of argument. The United States spent decades in what was actually called the War of the Dots, with New York Point, American Braille and Boston Line Type competing, until Standard English Braille settled it in 1918. Unified English Braille, the table this page uses, was developed from 1991 onwards and adopted by the United States in 2016 — the last major English-speaking country to switch.

15: His age when the six-dot cell was finished
12 → 6: Dots, after Braille halved Barbier's cell
63: Patterns available from six dots
1854: France adopts it, two years after his death

How it works

Six dots, 63 patterns, and one fingertip

The cell is two columns of three dots, numbered 1-2-3 down the left and 4-5-6 down the right. That numbering is not decoration — it is how braille is described, taught and typed. Dots 1-4-5 is d. Dots 2-4-5 is j. Once you know the numbers you can say a cell out loud.

The alphabet has a structure that is easy to miss. The first ten letters, a to j, use only the top four dots. Add dot 3 to each of them and you get k to t. Add dots 3 and 6 and you get u to z — except w, which does not fit the pattern at all, because Louis Braille was working in French and French had no use for the letter. W was added later and given the leftover shape.

Numbers reuse the first ten letters. A number sign, dots 3-4-5-6, switches into number mode, and then a is 1, b is 2, and j is 0 rather than a tenth digit. Capitals work the same way, with dot 6 in front of the letter, or twice for a whole word in capitals. Braille has no separate uppercase shapes; it has prefixes.

Grade 2 is where it stops being a simple substitution cipher. About 180 contractions replace common letter groups and whole words: a single cell for "the", another for "and", a lone letter g meaning "go". Some are only legal at the start of a word, some only in the middle, some only standing alone. The same cell means "ea" between two letters and a comma anywhere else. That positional dependence is why a contraction table by itself is not a translator.

By hand

Working out a cell on paper

You can encode a word by hand with nothing but the numbering, and doing it once makes the whole system click into place.

1

Three positions on the left, top to bottom: 1, 2, 3. Three on the right: 4, 5, 6. Every letter is a subset of those six positions.
2

Using only dots 1, 2, 4 and 5: a is 1, b is 1-2, c is 1-4, d is 1-4-5, e is 1-5, f is 1-2-4, g is 1-2-4-5, h is 1-2-5, i is 2-4, j is 2-4-5.
3

k is a plus dot 3, so 1-3. l is b plus dot 3, so 1-2-3. Carry on to t and you have twenty letters from ten shapes.
4

u is a plus 3 and 6, so 1-3-6. v is 1-2-3-6. Skip w. x is 1-3-4-6, y is 1-3-4-5-6, z is 1-3-5-6.
5

Dots 2-4-5-6. It follows nothing, and now you know why.

Diagnosis

If something is not working

Symptom:The braille shows as empty boxes or question marks

Likely cause:: The font in use has no glyphs for the braille block. The characters are correct — they simply cannot be drawn.
What to do:: Copy the text into an application with a fuller font, or install one that covers U+2800 to U+28FF. On most systems the DejaVu and Noto families include braille. The characters copy and paste correctly regardless of whether they display.

Symptom:Spanish text loses its accents

Likely cause:: The English table has no cells for á, é, í, ó, ú, ü or ñ, so those letters pass through unchanged rather than being quietly turned into unaccented ones.
What to do:: Switch the table to Spanish. Grade 2 turns off automatically when you do, because the contractions are English and applying them to Spanish would produce confident nonsense.

Symptom:The six-key keyboard does not type anything

Likely cause:: It only works in the braille-to-text direction, because you are typing braille rather than letters, and it needs the page to have keyboard focus.
What to do:: Turning it on switches the direction for you. If nothing appears, click once on the page background so the keystrokes reach it, then hold a chord and release the keys together.

Symptom:Grade 2 output looks wrong to someone who reads braille

Likely cause:: This page implements the common contractions and their positional rules, not the full UEB rulebook, which runs to hundreds of pages and includes cases that depend on syllable boundaries and word meaning.
What to do:: Use it for learning, labelling and drafting. For anything that will be embossed and read by someone who depends on it, have a qualified transcriber check the file — that is what transcription services are for.

Trivia

Things worth knowing

It started as a military code

Charles Barbier developed raised-dot writing so soldiers could read orders at night without striking a light that would give away their position. It was never widely used by the army, and it reached blind students almost by accident.

Twelve dots was the whole problem

Barbier's cell was too tall for a fingertip to take in at once, so a reader had to move the finger up and down each character. Braille's six-dot cell can be read without the finger moving off it, which is what makes fluent reading possible at all.

The school banned it

A director of the Paris institution had braille books destroyed and forbade the system, arguing blind pupils should read the same embossed Latin letters as everyone else. The students carried on using it privately, and it outlived him.

The Americans called it the War of the Dots

For decades the United States could not agree on a system, with New York Point and American Braille competing directly. The dispute was bitter enough to have its own name, and was only settled in 1918.

Unicode gave braille 256 patterns, not 63

The braille block added in Unicode 3.0 runs from U+2800 to U+28FF, covering eight-dot cells as well as six. Eight-dot braille is used for computer notation, where the extra two dots carry case and other flags without a prefix.

Questions

Frequently asked questions

Is braille a language?

No. It is a writing system, in the same way the Latin alphabet is. English braille writes English, Spanish braille writes Spanish, and they use overlapping but different tables — Spanish needs cells for á, é, í, ó, ú, ü and ñ that English braille spends on other things.

What is the difference between grade 1 and grade 2?

Grade 1 is letter for letter. Grade 2 adds around 180 contractions: single cells standing for whole words like "and" or "the", and shortcuts for common letter groups like "ing" and "ch". Almost all published braille is grade 2, because uncontracted braille is enormous — grade 2 saves roughly a quarter of the space.

Can I translate a photo of braille?

Not here. This page works on braille that is already text — Unicode characters you can paste. Reading dots off a photograph means finding the grid, correcting the angle, and telling a raised dot from a shadow or a paper flaw, which is computer vision rather than a lookup table. Mobile braille-recognition apps and the transcription services run by blindness organisations do it, and the latter have a person check the result.

Why does my contracted braille not come back as the same text?

Because contracted braille is genuinely ambiguous cell by cell. The same shape is "ea" between two letters and a comma outside a word; another is "be" at the start of a word and "bb" in the middle. Decoding needs the positional rules and sometimes needs the meaning, so this page prefers the plain letter reading where it cannot be sure, and says so rather than guessing confidently.

Can I print this on a normal printer?

You can print the shapes, but nobody will be able to read them with a finger. Embossing needs a braille embosser, which punches the paper from behind, and heavier paper than an inkjet takes. The download button produces a .brf, which is the file those machines read; short of owning one, that is the file a transcription service or a library braille unit will want from you.

What is the empty braille cell for?

U+2800, the braille pattern with no dots raised, is a real character rather than a space, and it is why braille pasted into some editors appears to contain invisible content. It marks a cell position that is deliberately blank.

How do the six keys map to a real machine?

A Perkins Brailler has six keys plus a space bar, and you press all the dots of a cell simultaneously, like a chord. F D S under the left hand are dots 1, 2 and 3; J K L under the right are 4, 5 and 6. The design dates from 1951 and the machines are still made; the layout here is the same one, so practice transfers.