American Action Fund for Blind Children and Adults
Future Reflections Special Issue on Braille VERSATILITY
How Does Braille Work in Languages Other Than English?
by Donald Winiecki
From the Editor: Donald Winiecki, EdD PhD, is the founder of Handid Braille Services https://www.handid.org, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization specializing in the production of Braille in languages other than English. In addition to producing Braille, Don partners with multiple organizations to develop Braille codes for underrepresented languages and languages at risk of losing all of their speaking members. In recognition of his work, he was the recipient of a 2024 NFB Jacob Bolotin Award. He is currently a member of the Board of Directors for the National Braille Association (NBA, https://nationalbraille.org) and chairperson of NBA’s World Languages Braille Committee. He is the USA representative on the Committee for Maintaining Technical Braille Codes of the International Council on English Braille (ICEB) https://iceb.org. He is a member of NFB’s President’s Committee on the Advancement and Promotion of Braille (CAPB). In his day job, Don is a professor in the Organizational Performance and Workplace Learning (OPWL) program at Boise State University in Boise, Idaho, where he has taught for thirty years.
You all know about Braille. In its most common form, each Braille symbol is made up of six dots, with two columns of three dots in each one. The Braille code was first used in France somewhere around 1824; its originator, Louis Braille, was French.
By 2024, more than 150 languages had approved Braille codes, and the list is still growing. There are Braille codes for Arabic, Bengali, Chinese (both Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese), English, Farsi, Hawaiian, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, Navajo, and languages all the way down the alphabet to Zulu. Not surprisingly, there is a Braille code for the “universal language” called Esperanto, and there are even rumors of developments toward Klingon Braille!
Today there are active developments in the creation of an updated version of Braille for Yiddish, and there are efforts to develop Braille for languages of indigenous people in North America and Oceania. Navajo Braille is in active use to expand the number of speakers and readers of Navajo. It is becoming part of the curriculum recognized by the Navajo Nation Department of Diné Education (NNDODE).
Uniquely, Hebrew Braille as used in the USA and most of the world is different from Hebrew Braille as used in Israel and for Biblical Hebrew. Another even more detailed code for Hebrew Braille is used for Cantillation, the ritualistic chanting of Hebrew scripture used in Jewish worship. Similarly, Arabic Braille as used in secular documents such as newspapers, menus, and nonreligious books, is different from the Arabic Braille used in religious materials and for Qura’at, and in representing the different chanting styles used when reading the Holy Qur’an aloud. Across the Islamic world there are variations in how the Holy Qur’an is represented in Braille, and a group of scholars is working toward unification of all the Qur’anic Braille codes. All of this is to ensure that the contents are pronounced faithfully in their specific uses.
Today there are even Braille codes for Biblical languages no longer in common spoken use. These codes are used by linguists and historians to study and conserve these languages and particular kinds of content.
All of these codes use the standard six-dot Braille cell to represent symbols, punctuation, and accent marks. With the rise of electronic Braille devices, eight-dot Braille codes are becoming more common. In eight-dot Braille the Braille cell is made up of two columns of four dots each. The additional two dots are used to indicate capitalization, punctuation marks, numbers, and other features in a way that is more compact than is possible with six-dot Braille. However, eight-dot Braille is not yet in widespread use.
How Does Braille Work in Languages Other Than English?
In most cases, Braille in other languages works much as it does in English. Specific symbols represent each letter in the alphabet. In the Romance languages (French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and Spanish) the letters are mostly the same as those used in Unified English Braille (UEB). Additional Braille symbols represent letters that have diacritics or other markings. The same is true for other languages such as Vietnamese Braille.
Most Braille codes include both uncontracted (grade 1) and contracted (grade 2) forms, but some languages don’t use contractions much of the time. For example, while there is a contracted form of Spanish Braille, uncontracted Spanish is the norm. Russian Braille is only represented in uncontracted form. Uniquely, Vietnamese actually has a “grade 0” form that is analogous to uncontracted Braille in UEB. Grade 1 Vietnamese Braille contains some contractions, and grade 2 Vietnamese contains all of the available contractions. Speaking of contractions, you may be interested to know that Braille on pharmaceutical packaging is always written in the uncontracted form.
Many languages do not use the Latin alphabet with which we are familiar in the United States, but they have alphabets of their own. In such cases there are Braille symbols for each letter or symbol and additional Braille symbols for diacritics. In languages with an alphabet where, in print, consonants are represented with a letter-like symbol and vowels are represented with diacritics or markings above and/or below a letter, Braille works the same way. However, in Braille, while a diacritic is placed before the symbol it applies to in Romance languages, in Arabic the vowel is placed after the letter to which it applies.
You may know that Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew, and Urdu are languages that are written from right to left in print. However, no matter how a language is written in print, all Braille is written from left to right.
Some Unique Challenges
Some languages are written quite differently from English. In print the Korean language is represented in “blocks” of two, three, four, and sometimes more symbols, arranged in a small table with up to four cells. As a result, Korean is written in two-dimensional blocks rather than as a linear list of letters, with each block analogous to a syllable. However, Korean Braille symbols are written on the same line, the same way that UEB is written.
In print, Korean has fourteen consonants and ten vowels. Depending on its placement within a word, a consonant or vowel may be represented with a different Braille symbol. It may not be represented at all if it is a “silent letter.”
In print, Japanese uses at least three symbol systems. Kanji are Chinese symbols adapted for use in Japanese print. Hiragana symbols are used for indigenous Japanese words, and Katakana symbols are used for “loan words” or words derived from another language. Both Hiragana and Katakana are phonetic lettering systems. In fact, both Hiragana and Katakana contain the same sounds.
A reader of Japanese in print knows what sort of word they are reading by the symbols used. However, in Japanese Braille all words are represented in phonetic symbols. This makes it possible for a tactile reader to “read the sound” of the words, whether the words are written in print using Kanji, Hiragana, or Katakana. However, the Braille reader has to learn separately where a word comes from. Also, just as is the case in English, some Hiragana or Katakana symbols have different sounds, depending on where they appear in a word, and sometimes depending on the word itself (similar to the way the “c” in English sounds different in “cat” and “cyber”). This means that in Japanese Braille a word may be spelled differently in print and Braille, so the pronunciation is represented properly in Braille.
Simplified Chinese (Mandarin) and Traditional Chinese (Cantonese) are languages that are not written in alphabetic letters, so they presented a unique puzzle for transcription into Braille. In fact, the same puzzle had to be solved when figuring out how to type Chinese symbols—it would be impossible to have a keyboard with the thousands of symbols necessary!
The puzzle was solved for simplified Chinese with the development of Pinyin, a Romanized version of Chinese that approximates a phonetic spelling of Chinese words. In a computer word processor, the computer has been programmed to recognize Pinyin and automatically converts it to display the proper simplified Chinese symbol on the screen. Because Pinyin uses the same twenty-six letters as the English alphabet, it was a straightforward process to map those letters to represent a phonetic version of simplified Chinese script in Braille.
The Formatting of Braille
You may think that all we have to do is put text into Braille and we’re good to go! However, this isn’t the case. The formatting of Braille text to identify headings, body text, lists, and especially tables, is important in helping a reader understand the structure and organization of information on a page. In North America, the guidebook for formatting Braille textbooks is 672 pages long! You can learn more about it at https://www.brailleauthority.org/publications-area.
Even after a document is transcribed into Braille, it won’t be useful until it can be put into physical form. It can be embossed onto paper or saved digitally for display on a refreshable Braille device (RBD).
In North America, Braille is most commonly embossed onto 120# or heavier paper that is 11.5” wide and 11” tall. In other parts of the world it is common for Braille to be embossed into A4 size paper sheets.
The machines that create embossed Braille are called, surprisingly enough, embossers. These are fantastic machines (and fantastically loud!) and they cost a pretty penny. Even a basic embosser may cost three thousand dollars or more.
RBDs are devices that contain a six-key Perkins style keyboard and one row of Braille cells. Models are available with line lengths varying from twelve cells to eighty cells. Multi-line RBDs and RBDs specialized for displaying simple graphics are becoming available, but costs are still very high for the average user. We are optimistic that production costs can be reduced, and eventually these devices will become more affordable.
Artificial Intelligence and Braille
Because you are an active participant in the world of 2026, by now you’re probably thinking that, despite the differences between Braille codes, you can simply tell your AI tool to translate something into Braille and get a perfect result. However, you’d be wrong, for now at least.
As of April 2026, AI is still very unreliable when it comes to translating anything into proper Braille, and this is only for UEB (Unified English Braille)! My experiments with AI production of Braille for other languages show there is still a long way to go. This is due in part to the way AI “learns.” AI learns by consuming huge (that’s HUGE!) quantities of data and identifying patterns. Since there is not a huge amount of Braille online for AI to study, it hasn’t gotten very good yet.
Other Braille Codes
While Louis Braille is known to have developed literary Braille for the French language, he also developed a music Braille code. In fact, some historians are convinced that his music Braille was the first Braille code officially recognized in France. The Braille music code used today has changed very little since Louis Braille’s day.
Mathematics is known by some to be a “universal language,” a form of expression that is the same no matter where you are on earth. However, you may be surprised to learn that there are dozens of different Braille codes for math, chemistry, and scientific notation. Nemeth Code Braille is perhaps the most widely used Braille code for math and science in the United States. The UEB technical code is growing in use and is the standard in the UK, Canada, Australia, and other countries that use UEB. Adopted in 2016, UEB includes its own symbols and formatting rules for mathematics and science, from arithmetic to very advanced machine learning. There are also mathematical Braille codes specialized for Arabic, Russian, and other languages.
Across all languages, the same Braille system is used to represent Arabic numerals. Some languages have additional Braille symbols to represent when print numbers are written in non-Roman symbols.
Finally, while punctuation marks are fairly consistent across all languages in print (and all Romance languages use the same punctuation symbols), Braille punctuation differs across different languages. Commas, periods, parentheses, and other marks of punctuation are represented differently, depending upon the language. There is even a Braille code for IPA, the International Phonetic Alphabet, which is used by linguists to represent the sonic quality of languages.
Braille has come a long way since Louis Braille’s first attempts in the early 1800s. The simple six-dot cell that Louis Braille devised as a teenager in Paris has proved to be remarkably versatile, adapting to myriad human needs and cultures through the years.