How Braille Works: Cells, Dots, Grade 1 and Grade 2

Braille represents each letter, number or symbol as a pattern of raised dots in a cell of six positions, two columns of three. Readers feel the patterns with their fingertips. English Braille comes in two levels: Grade 1 spells every word letter by letter, and Grade 2, used in most books, adds about 180 contractions and short forms to save space.

The six-dot cell

The dot positions are numbered 1–2–3 down the left column and 4–5–6 down the right. Every Braille character is described by the dots that are raised. The letter b is dots 1-2 (⠃); the letter t is dots 2-3-4-5 (⠞). A cell is about 6 mm tall, small enough to be read with one touch of a fingertip, and there are 64 possible patterns including the blank cell.

The logic of the alphabet

Braille is not a random set of patterns. The alphabet is built in “decades” of ten:

• a to j use only the top four dots (1, 2, 4, 5): ⠁⠃⠉⠙⠑⠋⠛⠓⠊⠚.
• k to t are the same ten patterns plus dot 3: ⠅⠇⠍⠝⠕⠏⠟⠗⠎⠞.
• u, v, x, y, z are the first five plus dots 3 and 6: ⠥⠧⠭⠽⠵.
• w (⠺) is the odd one out. Louis Braille designed the code for French, which hardly used w, so it was added later.

Learn ten patterns and you can work out twenty-five letters. Our Braille Translator shows the dot numbers for every cell it produces.

Capitals, numbers and indicators

Braille has no separate capital letters and no separate digits. Instead, it uses indicators: cells that change the meaning of what follows.

• Capital indicator ⠠ (dot 6): the next letter is a capital. Two of them, ⠠⠠, make the whole word capitals.
• Numeric indicator ⠼ (dots 3-4-5-6): the letters a to j that follow are read as 1 to 0. So ⠼⠃⠚ is 20.
• Grade 1 indicator ⠰ (dots 5-6): in Unified English Braille, it marks a letter that must be read as a letter, for example a b straight after a number, or a single letter that could be mistaken for a contraction.

Grade 1 and Grade 2

Grade 1 Braille (uncontracted) spells words out letter by letter, plus punctuation and indicators. It is what beginners learn first and what our tool produces.

Grade 2 (contracted) is the standard for books, magazines and signs in English. It uses:

• Whole-word signs: a single letter on its own stands for a common word. ⠃ alone is “but”, ⠉ is “can”, ⠙ is “do”.
• Special cells for common words and letter groups: ⠯ is “and”, ⠮ is “the”, ⠿ is “for”, ⠌ is “st”, ⠻ is “er”.
• Short forms: abbreviations such as ⠁⠃ for “about” and ⠛⠗ for “great”.

Grade 2 takes up about a quarter less space than Grade 1 and is faster to read once learned. That matters, because Braille books are bulky: a single print novel can fill several large volumes.

Unified English Braille

For most of the 20th century, English-speaking countries used slightly different Braille codes, plus separate codes for maths and computing. Unified English Braille (UEB) was developed to bring most of these together into one system. Most English-speaking countries adopted it between the mid-2000s and the 2010s, and the United States completed the switch in 2016. UEB changed some punctuation and removed a few contractions that caused confusion.

Louis Braille and the history of the code

Louis Braille was born in 1809 in Coupvray, near Paris, and lost his sight after an accident in his father’s workshop at the age of three. At the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, students read books with large embossed Latin letters, which were slow to read and impossible to write by hand. Braille learned of “night writing”, a system of raised dots devised by the army officer Charles Barbier, which used cells of up to twelve dots for sounds. As a teenager, Braille simplified it to a six-dot cell that a fingertip could feel in one touch, and based it on letters rather than sounds. He published his system in 1829. It was officially adopted in France in 1854, two years after his death, and spread around the world.

Braille today

Braille is written with a Perkins Brailler (a six-key mechanical typewriter), with a slate and stylus by hand, or produced by embossers connected to a computer. Refreshable Braille displays, with small pins that rise and fall, let readers use phones and computers. Braille also appears on medicine packaging in the EU, on lift buttons and on signs. Unicode includes all 256 patterns of eight-dot Braille (U+2800 to U+28FF), which is how our tool can show and copy Braille cells as text.

Related reading: Morse code is the other great 19th-century code built from two simple signals; try our Morse Code Translator.

Sources

• Library of Congress, Braille 200 (National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled)
• The Unicode Consortium, Braille Patterns code chart
• Braille Authority of North America, The Rules of Unified English Braille (2nd ed., 2013).