Braille Translator

This braille translator converts English into Unicode braille characters and back again. It implements grade 1 (uncontracted) Unified English Braille, the form taught to beginners, where every printed letter maps to exactly one braille cell. That makes it ideal for learning the alphabet, labelling a project, checking homework, or reading a braille string someone sent you.

Three conventions are handled automatically. A capital letter is preceded by the capital sign ⠠, a run of digits is preceded by the number sign ⠼ (with 1–9 and 0 reusing the cells for a–i and j), and common punctuation has its own cells — ⠲ for a full stop, ⠂ for a comma, ⠦ for a question mark. Switch to Braille → Text and the translator reads those indicators back out to recover the original capitalisation and numbers.

An important limitation: this is not grade 2 contracted braille, which compresses common words and letter groups into single cells and is what most published braille actually uses. And Unicode braille is a visual representation — it will not emboss correctly on its own. For anything that a blind reader will actually use, have the output checked by a qualified transcriber. Everything here runs in your browser with nothing uploaded.