Braille Translator

Choose Text → Braille to convert supported English text into Unicode Braille Pattern characters. Choose Braille → Text to decode supported cells, indicators, spaces, line breaks, and punctuation into readable English text.

Translation happens as you type. The output can be copied, and the Cell dot patterns panel explains the raised-dot pattern of every unique Braille cell used.

Switching direction carries a valid result into the opposite input, making it easy to check a short conversion in both directions.

Text input supports the unaccented English alphabet A–Z, uppercase letters, digits 0–9, ordinary spaces, line breaks, and a defined set of common punctuation and grouping symbols.

The translator reports unsupported characters instead of deleting them or inventing a Braille meaning. This is important because accents, mathematical notation, currency symbols, technical symbols, and other writing systems require additional UEB rules or different Braille codes.

Braille-to-text input must consist of supported Unicode Braille cells. The tool does not recognise photographs of embossed pages, images made from visible dots, Braille ASCII, or contracted wordsigns.

A basic literary Braille cell contains two columns and three rows. Dots 1, 2, and 3 run from top to bottom on the left; dots 4, 5, and 6 run from top to bottom on the right.

A cell is identified by listing its raised dots in numerical order. The letter A is dot 1, B is dots 1-2, C is dots 1-4, and the capital indicator is dot 6.

The result's Cell dot patterns panel uses this same notation, so a copied character can be inspected without relying only on its visual glyph.

The alphabet chart lists each lowercase letter cell and its raised-dot combination. Uppercase letters use the same alphabet cell preceded by a capital indicator.

This translator writes one capital indicator before every uppercase letter. For example, A becomes ⠠⠁ and the all-capital sequence USA becomes ⠠⠥⠠⠎⠠⠁.

Braille digits reuse the cells for letters a through j. A numeric indicator, ⠼ or dots 3-4-5-6, tells the reader to interpret the following cells as digits 1 through 0.

A continuous digit sequence needs one numeric indicator at its beginning. The number 2026 is therefore ⠼⠃⠚⠃⠋ rather than repeating ⠼ before every digit.

Comma and full stop remain valid symbols while numeric mode is active, allowing values such as 1,000 and 3.14. When a lowercase a–j follows a digit, comma, or full stop without an intervening space, the translator inserts the grade 1 symbol indicator ⠰ so the letter is not mistaken for another digit.

The punctuation chart shows every print symbol accepted by the text-to-Braille converter and the Unicode sequence returned for it.

Some symbols use a single cell, while quotation marks, brackets, slashes, and the underscore use two-cell sequences with a prefix. The decoder recognises the same documented sequences in reverse.

Straight keyboard quotation marks are supported. Curly typographic quotation marks and other punctuation not listed below are rejected rather than treated as equivalent automatically.

Uncontracted Braille writes words letter by letter. Contracted Braille uses whole-word signs, groupsigns, and shortened forms to reduce the number of cells in appropriate contexts.

Uncontracted Braille is often informally called Grade 1, and many people search for a Grade 1 Braille translator. In Unified English Braille, however, grade 1 mode is also a specific indicator-controlled mode used to prevent characters from being read as contractions. “Uncontracted English Braille” is the more precise description of this tool.

The decoder cannot expand contracted Braille because the meaning of a cell can depend on whether it stands alone, its position in a word, surrounding punctuation, and other UEB rules. It recognises the grade 1 symbol indicator only for the documented literal-letter behaviour supported by this converter.

The UEB capital indicator ⠠, dot 6, makes the following letter uppercase. The word Hello begins with ⠠⠓ because only H is capitalised.

UEB also defines capital word and capital passage modes for longer uppercase sequences. This compact translator does not generate or decode those modes; it uses one capital indicator before each uppercase letter.

That choice keeps the supported conversion reversible and easy to inspect, but it can use more cells than professional UEB transcription for an all-capital word or passage.

Braille is a tactile reading and writing system used to represent many languages. The same physical dot pattern does not have one universal linguistic meaning in every Braille code.

This page applies a documented subset of Unified English Braille. It should not be used to convert Spanish, French, Arabic, Hindi, or another language merely by replacing letters with the English chart.

Likewise, specialist systems such as Nemeth mathematics, music Braille, computer Braille, and national language codes require their own rules and symbols.

Unicode encodes 256 Braille Pattern characters from U+2800 through U+28FF. Those characters describe dot shapes; Unicode deliberately leaves their linguistic meaning to standards and user communities such as UEB.

The Unicode block includes all 64 six-dot patterns plus additional eight-dot patterns. This translator uses a supported six-dot English subset and rejects other patterns it cannot interpret safely.

Seeing ⠃ on a screen does not make it tactile. A normal display cannot produce physical raised dots, and ordinary printing does not create correctly sized embossed Braille.

The converter represents a word space with U+2800 BRAILLE PATTERN BLANK so the output appears as a Braille-width blank between cells.

Unicode's character chart notes that this pattern is a fixed-width blank in many fonts but does not behave as an ordinary space. Some editors or messaging apps may therefore wrap, search, or trim the copied output differently.

The reverse translator accepts both an ordinary space and U+2800 as a word space and returns an ordinary text space.

This translator is useful for learning the alphabet, checking short uncontracted phrases, converting a name, inspecting dot patterns, and copying simple Unicode Braille.

It is not suitable for producing textbooks, examinations, medication labels, public signs, legal documents, mathematics, technical material, or other accessibility-critical content without standards-aware software and qualified review.

Production workflows may require contracted translation, formatting rules, page layout, BRF output, an embosser, tactile quality control, and review by a qualified Braille transcriber.

The text is converted locally in the browser. It is not sent to a translation service, uploaded as a document, stored by the tool, or placed into a share URL.

Local processing is especially useful for names and short private notes, although users should still consider the privacy of any device, browser extension, clipboard manager, or application where they later paste the result.