Type or paste English to see it in Unified English Braille, letter for letter, with capitals, numbers and punctuation written the way the official rulebook sets out. Or paste braille to read it back.
Printing is not embossing. An ordinary printer makes flat ink dots that cannot be read by touch. Use this sheet to learn, teach or check braille by eye. For tactile braille, send the .brf file to a braille embosser, or write it with a brailler or a slate and stylus.
This is grade 1 (uncontracted) Unified English Braille: every letter is written out, with no contractions. A dot 6 cell ⠠ marks a capital, two of them a whole word in capitals, and three a passage of three or more capitalised words, closed with ⠠⠄. Numbers start with the number sign ⠼ and use the letters a to j as digits. After a number, a lowercase a to j needs the grade 1 indicator ⠰, so 3c is ⠼⠉⠰⠉, and so does a question mark in an unusual place.
Print sometimes cannot be decided by rule alone: whether ' is an apostrophe or a quotation mark, whether — is a dash or a long dash. The translator follows the rulebook's guidance for software, but a braille transcriber should check anything that will be published.
Switch to Braille to text and paste Unicode braille (or braille ASCII from a .brf file). On a device without a braille keyboard, tick dots 1 to 6 and add cells one at a time.
Each tool has its own page, works with a keyboard and screen reader, and keeps working offline once loaded.
Two free tools from elsewhere that are useful when you look after a website, a newsletter or an event.
Accessibility and security both start with a well-built page. WebTraceCheck's free security headers check reads a site's Content-Security-Policy, HSTS, Referrer-Policy and more, and its website audit lists the page's metadata, so you can see what a page sends before you share it.
Run a security headers checkRunning a newsletter or an event sign-up? Use a temporary address from CleanTempMail to go through the form as a reader would and read the confirmation email they get. There is no account, and the inbox deletes itself after three days.
Open a temporary inboxNo. Grade 2 (contracted) braille shortens common words and letter groups, and most adult braille readers use it. Grade 1 spells everything out, which suits beginners, labels, names and short signs.
Yes. A .brf file holds braille ASCII, 40 cells per line and 25 lines per page, which braille embossers and many braille displays read directly. Check your embosser's settings for line length.
A few characters have no symbol in this translator, such as emoji or the vertical bar. They are kept as they are and listed under the braille so you can decide what to do with them.