Braille Alphabet
The 26 Grade 1 braille letters and digits, plus a live text-to-braille converter.
⠠⠓⠑⠇⠇⠕ ⠼⠃⠚⠃⠋
The 26 Grade 1 letters
Digits 0–9
Each number is the number sign ⠼ followed by the letter a–j.
Braille writes each letter as a raised six-dot cell — two columns of three dots, numbered 1-2-3 down the left and 4-5-6 down the right. The 26 English letters shown here are Grade 1 (uncontracted) braille. A number sign ⠼ marks digits, and a capital sign ⠠ marks capital letters.
How a braille cell works
Every braille character sits in one cell: a rectangle of up to six raised dots arranged in two vertical columns of three. The dots are numbered by position — 1, 2, 3 run top to bottom down the left column, and 4, 5, 6 run top to bottom down the right. A letter is defined purely by which of those six positions are raised, so “dots 1-2-4” always means the same shape.
Reading the reference above
The converter turns whatever you type into braille cells in real time, and the tables list each of the 26 letters and the ten digits with the exact dots that make them. The glyphs are drawn from the Unicode Braille Patterns block (U+2800–U+28FF): the codepoint for any cell is U+2800 plus a bitmask where dot 1 adds 1, dot 2 adds 2, dot 3 adds 4, dot 4 adds 8, dot 5 adds 16, and dot 6 adds 32.
Special signs used in Grade 1 braille
Prefix cells that change how the cells after them are read.
| Sign | Dots | Braille | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|
| Number sign | 3-4-5-6 | ⠼ | Marks the cells that follow as digits 0–9 |
| Capital sign | 6 | ⠠ | Capitalises the single letter that follows |
| Space | (none) | ⠀ | An empty cell separates words |
Number sign, capital sign, and Grade 1 vs Grade 2
Braille has only 26 letter shapes, so digits reuse the first ten. The digits 1–9 and 0 are written with the same cells as the letters a–i and j, but preceded by the number sign ⠼ (dots 3-4-5-6) to signal that a run of numbers follows. In the same way, the capital sign ⠠ (dot 6) placed before a letter marks it as a capital.
This tool shows Grade 1, or uncontracted, braille — one cell for every letter, exactly as written above. Grade 2 (contracted) braille goes further, using extra cells and abbreviations to stand for whole words or common letter groups such as “and”, “the”, or “-ing”, which makes text far more compact but adds many rules to learn. Grade 1 is the foundation you read first; Grade 2 builds on the same cells.