Braille is a touch alphabet. Each letter is a pattern of up to six raised dots arranged in two columns of three, which a reader feels with the fingertips. Louis Braille, a French teenager who had lost his sight in childhood, devised the system in the 1820s, building on a military night-writing code, and it has been used by blind and low-vision readers ever since.
This tool shows text as Braille characters, using the patterns Unicode includes for the purpose, and decodes them back.
What you get
Choose Encode and type. “Hello World 2026” becomes ⠠⠓⠑⠇⠇⠕ ⠠⠺⠕⠗⠇⠙ ⠼⠃⠚⠃⠋. A few things in that line are worth understanding, as they show how real Braille works.
Capital letters are announced by a prefix dot pattern, ⠠, placed before the letter. Braille letters have no separate upper and lowercase forms, so the sign is how a reader knows. Numbers use a number sign, ⠼, followed by letters of the alphabet: the digits 1 to 9 and 0 use the same patterns as the letters a to j. So 2026 is the number sign, then b, j, b, f. The sign is placed once for a run of digits, and a space ends the number.
Common punctuation has its own patterns, including the full stop, comma, semicolon, colon, question mark, exclamation mark, apostrophe, hyphen, brackets and quotation marks. Characters not in the table, such as accented letters and symbols, are passed through unchanged.
Decoding
Choose Decode and paste Braille characters. The tool recognises letters, the capital sign and the number sign, and turns them back into text. Spaces and line breaks stay as they are.
What it is and what it is not
This is a basic, letter-for-letter form, usually called Grade 1 Braille. It is useful for learning the alphabet, creating a display, or a puzzle, and for seeing what a word looks like in Braille.
It is not what many experienced readers use. Most published Braille in English is Grade 2, which uses contractions: single cells that stand for common words like “and”, “the” and “for” and for groups of letters like “ing” and “ch”, so that books are shorter and quicker to read. This tool does not produce contractions, and Braille has separate codes for mathematics, music and computing, as well as for other languages and scripts.
The characters shown are Unicode Braille patterns, which are for display on a screen. They are not suitable for sending to an embosser or for producing documents that blind readers will rely on, as these need proper translation software and a human to check the layout. If you need accessible material, ask a Braille transcription service, or look at your national blind organisation, which can produce and advise.
Curiosities
The six-dot cell has 64 combinations. Unicode includes an eight-dot version, used for computer Braille, with 256. If you want to look at the characters under the hood, the text to Unicode converter shows their code points, which run from U+2800 to U+28FF. Other ways of writing text in dots and marks include Morse code and the binary translator.