Braille (Grade 1) Translator

How it is calculated

The tool converts text to uncontracted (Grade 1) Braille using Unicode Braille characters, one cell per character. Each letter a to z maps to its cell. A capital letter is preceded by the capital sign (⠠). A run of digits starts with the number sign (⠼) and then uses the cells for a to j for 1 to 9 and 0, and the number sign is not repeated until a non-digit appears. Spaces are kept, and the punctuation marks . , ; : ! ? ' - have their own cells. Any other character, including accented letters, brackets, quotation marks and symbols, is silently skipped. In Braille-to-text mode the same table is reversed. Contractions (Grade 2) are not supported.

Common mistakes

• Expecting accented letters or punctuation outside the supported list to appear. The tool drops them without warning, so café becomes caf in Braille.
• Assuming the output is contracted Braille as in most books. This is Grade 1 only, with one cell per letter, so it is longer than published Grade 2 text.
• Using the output as a physical Braille file or embosser input without checking. These are Unicode characters for screens, and your printer or embosser may need a Braille translation table.
• Translating non-English text. Other languages use their own cell assignments for letters such as ç or ö, and these are not provided.
• Pasting Braille with a mix of letters and digits and expecting numbers to decode without the number sign; in decoding, digits only appear after ⠼.