Braille Text Generator

What is Braille?

Braille is a tactile writing system used by people who are blind or have low vision. Each "cell" is a small pattern of up to six raised dots, arranged in two columns of three, and different combinations of raised dots represent letters, numbers, and punctuation. In digital text, these cells are represented by the Unicode Braille Patterns block (U+2800–U+28FF), where each code point encodes exactly which of the six (or eight, on some systems) dots are raised.

This tool converts ordinary text into that Unicode Braille block, so the result is plain text you can paste anywhere Unicode is supported — documents, chat apps, social media, or design software.

Grade 1 vs. Grade 2 Braille

Braille comes in two main "grades":

• Grade 1 (uncontracted) spells every word out letter by letter, with one Braille cell per letter, digit, or punctuation mark. This is what this tool produces.
• Grade 2 (contracted) adds hundreds of contractions and shorthand symbols (for example, a single cell can stand in for a whole common word) to make Braille faster to read and more compact to print. Grade 2 requires knowledge of its contraction rules and is not implemented here — this tool is scoped to straightforward, letter-for-letter Grade 1 conversion.

How this tool works

1. Type or paste text into the Input Text box.
2. The Braille Unicode Output box updates automatically.
3. Copy the result, or download it as a .txt file.

Letters are converted regardless of case (Braille has no separate uppercase cell shape at this level), digits are converted using the standard letter-based digit cells preceded by the Braille number sign, and common punctuation (comma, period, question mark, exclamation mark, colon, semicolon, apostrophe, hyphen, slash, and parentheses) is mapped to its corresponding cell. Any character this tool doesn't recognize — emoji, symbols, or accented letters, for example — is passed through unchanged rather than dropped, so no content silently disappears.

FAQ

Why doesn't a capital letter look different in the output? Grade 1 Braille distinguishes capitals with a separate "capital indicator" cell placed before the letter rather than a different shape for the letter itself. This tool keeps things simple by lowercasing letters before conversion; the base letter cell is unaffected by case.

Can I convert Braille back to text? This tool is one-directional (text → Braille). Reversing the process requires disambiguating the number sign and other prefix cells, which isn't in scope here.

Will the output display correctly everywhere? Braille Unicode characters are widely supported in modern fonts and apps, but very old software or fonts without Braille glyphs may render them as blank boxes or placeholders.

Privacy

This tool runs entirely in your browser. Your text is never uploaded to a server.