Braille alphabet

A braille cell has six dots in two columns of three. The dots are numbered one to three down the left column and four to six down the right. A letter is the set of dots that are raised, and that is what the translator stores: for the letter a, dot 1; for the letter k, dots 1-3. The figure beside this shows the cell of the letter a as it is drawn on the page, with dot one filled and the others empty.

The system was organised by Louis Braille, who was injured in an accident at three and completely blind by five, and who devised the alphabet at fifteen from Charles Barbier's code of twelve dots, cut in half. The logic he chose is that of the decades: the first ten letters use only the four upper dots, the second decade repeats the ten with dot three added, and the third repeats them with dots three and six. Whoever knows the first ten letters and the rule knows the whole alphabet; that is how the table on this page is generated, and how it is taught.

The exception is w, which the French of the time did not use. It was added later for English, as the letter j with dot six, ⠺, and it is the only cell of the 26 that does not follow the decades. The translator treats it as what it is, a case apart written once.

Braille has no separate cells for capitals. A capital letter is the same cell preceded by the capital sign, ⠠, which is dot six alone. London, with its initial capital, is⠠⠇⠕⠝⠙⠕⠝: seven cells for six letters. Digits reuse cells too: they are the letters a to j preceded by the number sign, ⠼, with a standing for one and j for zero, so the year 2026 is ⠼⠃⠚⠃⠋.

When a letter from a to j follows a number directly, inside one word, a reader would take it for a digit. To prevent that the letter sign, ⠰, goes in, and the translator inserts it by itself when needed, so letters and digits come back on the return trip as they were written. Spaces are an empty cell.

The 26 letters with their dots, the ten digits and the three signs. The dots of each letter are in the name column.

The table is the plain 26-letter alphabet that the languages written in the Latin alphabet share, and that English calls uncontracted or Grade 1; the braille of Japanese, Korean and Chinese is built on the same six dots but assigns them differently. Unified English Braille adds contractions, a shorthand for common words and letter groups that books and signs use, and it is not part of this translator. Punctuation has cells of its own in every braille code and none in this table: a comma or a full stop is left out of the braille and named beneath the boxes rather than guessed at. Accented letters are not in the table either, and the translator folds them to the base letter and says so, so café comes back ascafe. A wrong cell in a braille translator is an error the reader it most serves cannot see, so those cells stay out until each can be taken from the official code of its language.