Braille Alphabet & Patterns

It surprises most people: scroll past the alphabet above and the patterns stop being letters. A braille cell is a shape, not a character. Unicode encodes all 256 possible dot combinations purely by geometry — each one is named for the dots that are raised (⠧ is “dots-1236”), and that name is the whole definition.

Meaning is supplied by whichever braille code is doing the reading. In English literary braille, dots 1-2-3-6 is the letter v — but the same cell means something different in French braille, in Nemeth mathematics notation, and in music braille. One alphabet of shapes, many languages laid on top. That is why this chart, like the Unicode standard itself, labels each pattern by its dot numbers rather than pretending to a universal meaning.

The cells using dots 7 and 8 (the bottom row) come from computer braille. A refreshable braille display needs exactly one cell per character on screen, so things literary braille writes with two cells — like the capital sign ⠠ before a letter — get folded into a single cell instead: dot 7 added to ⠧ makes ⡧, a one-cell capital V. Screen readers rely on this to keep braille aligned with the text under the cursor.