About BrailleDot
BrailleDot is a free, browser-based tool that translates English to Unified English Braille and decodes braille back into English, built to handle both directions correctly rather than treating braille as a simple character swap.
Why this exists
Most free braille translators online get the easy cases right and fall apart on the details that actually matter: contractions that depend on word position, digits that need to sit correctly next to letters, email addresses that would break if a contraction slipped into them, and cells that mean two different things depending on where they appear in a word. Getting those details wrong doesn’t just produce awkward output, it produces braille that misrepresents the original text.
BrailleDot was built around getting those specific cases right, not around a feature checklist. Every contraction rule is checked against the Unified English Braille standard published by the Braille Authority of North America (BANA), and the translation engine runs against a regression suite built to catch the failure points that trip up simpler tools: morpheme boundary exceptions (like “rawhide” not contracting despite containing “wh”), digit and letter disambiguation, forced Grade 1 handling inside emails and URLs, and genuinely ambiguous cells in reverse decoding.
What’s actually in the tool
- Grade 1 and Grade 2 translation, switchable per input, so you can see exactly how the same text compresses under contraction rules
- Braille to English decoding, including support for both Unicode braille and numeric dot notation as input
- Voice input and image scanning (OCR), for getting text in without typing it
- A Perkins-style six-key keypad, for composing braille cell by cell the way a physical brailler works
- Export as .brf, .txt, or direct browser print, depending on whether the destination is an embosser, a plain file, or paper
The core translation engine runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you type for translation is sent to a server, logged, or stored. Voice input is the one exception, since it relies on your browser’s own built-in speech recognition service rather than anything client-side.
Who’s behind this
BrailleDot is built and maintained by me, Marcus Wren. I’m not a certified UEB transcriber, and I don’t present myself as one.
What I can stand behind is the engineering behind it: the contraction rules are checked directly against BANA’s published rulebook, and the regression suite exists specifically so changes to the tool can’t silently break output that used to be correct.
You can read more about how the tool was built on the author page.
If something looks wrong
Braille translation, particularly Grade 2 contraction, is genuinely context-dependent, and no automated tool replaces a qualified human transcriber for high-stakes documents like legal or medical material. If you spot an output that looks incorrect, I want to know. Confirmed issues get fixed and added to the regression suite so the same mistake doesn’t come back in a later update. Reach out through the contact page.