- What's the difference between Grade 1 and Grade 2 braille?
- Grade 1 is uncontracted: one braille cell per printed letter, plus indicators for capitals and numbers. It's what beginners learn and what you want on a short label, because anyone who knows the alphabet can read it. Grade 2 is contracted: about 180 shortcuts where a single cell stands for a whole word or a common letter group. "The" is one cell. "You can do it" is four cells instead of eleven. Almost every braille book, menu and exam paper is Grade 2, because contractions cut the page count by roughly a quarter — and braille pages are large, heavy and expensive. If you're producing something a fluent braille reader will use, Grade 2 is the right answer.
- Is this the same braille used everywhere in the world?
- No, and that trips people up. This translates Unified English Braille (UEB), the standard adopted by the US, UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Ireland, Nigeria and South Africa. Spanish, German, French and Portuguese braille use different cells for their accented letters, and languages like Hindi and Arabic use entirely separate codes. Maths is a third thing again — Nemeth code in the US has its own symbols for fractions and operators. So use this for English text, and don't paste a chemistry equation into it and expect a correct answer.
- Why does a number start with an extra cell?
- Because braille has no separate digits. The cells for 1 through 9 and 0 are the same cells as the letters a through j. The number sign ⠼ opens a run of digits and tells the reader "everything after this is numeric until something interrupts it." So 123 is four cells — the number sign followed by a, b, c. One number sign covers the whole run, not one per digit. The run ends at a space or a letter, which is why "a1" needs no extra marking but "3a" does.
- What is ASCII braille, and when do I need it?
- ASCII braille — also called BRF, after the file extension — maps each of the 64 possible braille cells to one ordinary keyboard character, so braille can travel through systems that only handle plain text. "Hello" comes out as ",HELLO": the comma is the capital indicator. Embossers read BRF, braille production software exchanges BRF, and most braille file libraries distribute BRF. If you're sending something to be physically embossed, that's the line you want. If you're putting braille on a web page or in a document, use the Unicode output instead.
- Can I emboss what this produces?
- The translation is embosser-ready in the sense that the cells are correct and the ASCII braille line is in the format embossing software imports. What it does not do is page formatting — braille pages have fixed line lengths (usually 40 cells), running heads, and page numbers in specific corners, and a transcriber sets those up per document. For a label, a sign, a card or a short handout, copy the ASCII line and emboss it. For a whole book, hand it to a transcriber and let them do layout.
- How accurate is the Grade 2 contraction?
- It's built to fail in the safe direction. Contractions are applied only where the rules are unambiguous — the whole-word signs, the shortform list, and groupsigns in the positions UEB allows them. Where a contraction would depend on how a word is pronounced or where its parts divide, the word is spelled out uncontracted instead. An uncontracted word inside Grade 2 text is still perfectly valid braille and a reader won't stumble on it; an incorrect contraction is a genuine error. Since some people emboss this output, that's the trade we chose. A human transcriber will still contract more than this does.
- My braille shows up as empty boxes. What's wrong?
- That's a font problem, not a translation problem — your device doesn't have a font containing the braille block (U+2800 to U+28FF). It's most common on older Windows installs. Copying still works: the characters are correct, they just have nothing to draw with. Paste them somewhere with a fuller font, install DejaVu Sans, or use the ASCII braille line instead, which is ordinary keyboard characters and renders everywhere.
- Does it handle accented letters like é or ñ?
- Yes — they're marked, never dropped. UEB handles an accented letter with the accent indicator (dots 4-5) placed before the base letter, which tells the reader the letter carries an accent without saying which one. So é is two cells: the accent indicator, then e. That's the correct UEB treatment, and it's why reading braille back gives you an unaccented letter — the information genuinely isn't in the braille. If you need proper Spanish, German or Portuguese braille, you need those languages' own tables, not UEB.
- How do I read the alphabet chart?
- Each cell is six dot positions, numbered 1, 2, 3 down the left column and 4, 5, 6 down the right. The letter a is dot 1 alone. B is dots 1 and 2. The first ten letters, a through j, use only the top four positions — and every other letter is built from those ten by adding dot 3, dot 6, or both. That's the whole system, and it's why braille is learnable in an afternoon: you're memorising ten shapes and three rules, not twenty-six unrelated patterns.
- Is what I type sent anywhere?
- No. The translation runs entirely in your browser — there's no server call, nothing is stored, and closing the tab clears it. No sign-up, no limit on how much you translate, no email required to see the output.
