Braille Translator (Text ↔ Braille)

Convert ordinary text into uncontracted (Grade 1) English Braille using Unicode braille patterns, and decode those dots back into text. Capital letters get a capital sign (⠠) and digits a number sign (⠼), exactly as in standard Braille, so the output is a faithful cell-by-cell transcription you can paste anywhere or compare against a Braille chart. Letters, digits and common punctuation (, . ? ! ' - : ; /) are supported. Everything runs locally in your browser — nothing is uploaded.

Uncontracted is the qualifier that matters, because it is not what most Braille readers actually read. Grade 2 contracts common words and letter groups into single cells: the, and and for each become one cell, and a word like knowledge shortens to k. That is what appears in published books and on signage, and it takes roughly a quarter less space. A Grade 1 transcription is correct, legible and noticeably longer than what a fluent reader expects.

The prefix signs are what make a small alphabet carry everything. Six dots give sixty-four patterns, which is not enough for upper and lower case plus digits plus punctuation, so Braille reuses them: the number sign turns the following cells into digits until a letter sign or a space ends the run, which is why ⠼ followed by the pattern for a reads as 1. Miss the prefix and the same cells say something else entirely.

What this produces is a transcription rather than an embossing. Physical Braille has a fixed cell size, a line length around forty cells and paging rules that a printed page has to follow, so a visual copy of these characters is not a file a Braille embosser can use. For anything meant to be read by touch, the format to hand a producer is BRF.

Other languages have their own tables, and several have their own contractions. This implements English Grade 1, so accented characters and non-Latin scripts fall outside it rather than transliterating.