English Braille

English Braille, also known as Grade 2 Braille, is the braille alphabet used for English. It consists of around 250 letters, numerals, punctuation, formatting marks, contractions, and abbreviations. Some English Braille letters, such as , correspond to more than one letter in print.
There are three levels of complexity in English Braille. Grade 1 is a nearly one-to-one transcription of printed English and is restricted to basic literacy. Grade 2, which is nearly universal beyond basic literacy materials, abandons one-to-one transcription in many places and adds hundreds of abbreviations and contractions. Both Grade 1 and Grade 2 have been standardized. "Grade 3" is any of various personal shorthands that are almost never found in publications. Most of this article describes the 1994 American edition of Grade 2 Braille, which is largely equivalent to British Grade 2 Braille. Some of the differences with Unified English Braille, which was officially adopted by various countries between 2005 and 2012, are discussed at the end.
Braille is frequently portrayed as a re-encoding of the English orthography used by sighted people. However, braille is a separate writing system, not a variant of the printed English alphabet.

History

Braille was introduced to Britain in 1861. In 1876, a French-based system with a few hundred English contractions and abbreviations was adopted as the predominant script in Great Britain. However, the contractions and abbreviations proved unsatisfactory, and in 1902 the current grade-2 system, called Revised Braille, was adopted in the British Commonwealth. In 1878, the ideal of basing all braille alphabets of the world on the original French alphabetic order was accepted by Britain, Germany, and Egypt. In the United States at the time, three scripts were used: non-braille New York Point; American Braille, which was reordered so that the most frequent letters were the ones with the fewest dots; and a variation of English Braille, which was reordered to match the English alphabet, assigning the values wxyz to the letters that, in France and England, stood for xyzç. A partially contracted English Braille, Grade, was adopted in Britain in 1918, and fully contracted Grade 2, with a few minor concessions to the Americans, was adopted in 1932. The concessions were to swap the British two-dot capital sign with the one-dot emphasis sign, which had generally been omitted anyway, to drop a few religious contractions from general usage, and to introduce a rule stating that contractions and abbreviations should not span "major" syllable boundaries.
In 1991, an American proposal was made for Unified English Braille, intended to eliminate the confusion caused by competing standards for academic uses of English Braille. After several design revisions, it has since been adopted by the Commonwealth countries starting in 2005, and by the United States. The chief differences with Revised Braille are in punctuation, symbols, and formatting, more accurately reflecting print conventions in matters such as brackets, mathematical notation, and typefaces.

System

The 64 braille patterns are arranged into decades based on the numerical order of those patterns. The first decade are the numerals 1 through 0, which utilize only the top and mid row of the cell; the 2nd through 4th decades are derived from the first by adding dots to the bottom row; the 5th decade is created by shifting the first decade downwards. In addition, for each decade there are two additional mirror-image patterns, and finally there are three patterns that utilize only the bottom row of the cell. The final pattern, the empty cell, is used as a space; it has the same width as the others.
Cells 1 through 25 plus 40 are assigned to the 26 letters of the basic Latin alphabet. The other 37 cells are often used for punctuation and typically assigned different values in different languages. The English grade-two values are as follows; cells with dots on only the right side do not have equivalents in printed English and are explained in the notes.

Alphabet

The English Braille alphabet has letters that correspond directly to the 26 letters of the English print alphabet plus ligatures that are equivalent to digraphs and sequences in print.

and

for

the

with

-ing

-ble^†

-ea-

-bb-

-cc-

-dd-^†

-ff-

-gg-

Some of these ligatures transcribe common words, such as and or of, but they are not words: Pronunciation and meaning are ignored, and only spelling is relevant. For example, is commonly used when the sequence of print letters the appears, not just for the word "the". That is, is the letter "the" in braille, as in the two-letter word then . Similarly, hand is written h-and, roof is written r-o-of, and forest is written with three letters in braille, for-e-st. Numbers are used this way as well—7th is written #-7-th, and here printed English approximates normal practice in braille. There are numerous conventions for when a print sequence is "contracted" this way in braille, and when it is spelled out in full.
The ligatures and may not begin a word, but are used everywhere else.
The ligatures of the third decade,, take precedence over the letters of later decades. For example, then is written the-n, not * th-en. When standing as words adjacent to other such words, or to a, no space is left between them. For example, and the, for a, with the, of a are all fused together.
When printed ch, gh, sh, th are pronounced as two sounds, as in Shanghai, hogshead, and outhouse, then they are written as two braille letters rather than with the ligatures. Generally, other ligatures should not be used if they might cause problems with legibility, as with the ing in lingerie, though they tend to be with familiar words, such as ginger and finger, even if their pronunciation is divided between syllables. None of the ligatures are to be used across the boundaries of compound words. For example, is not used in twofold, nor in dumbbell. The rules state that they should not span a prefix and stem either, so for example the ed in deduce, the er of rerun and derail, and the ble of sublet should be written out in full. In practice this is variable, as it depends upon the awareness of the writer. The of in professor, for example, might not be recognized spanning prefix and stem, and often a-cc-ept or a-dd-r-e-s-s are accepted, despite the technical violation. There is also conflict with the overriding tendency to contract sequences that fall within a single syllable. So the same writer who divides the er in derive may allow the ligature in derivation. A similar pattern emerges from suffixes: is not used in freedom, since it spans stem and suffix, but is used in freed, because it forms a single syllable with the stem. What is considered to constitute a prefix or suffix is somewhat arbitrary: is not used in Charlestown, for example, but it is in Charleston. Ligatures may also not separate digraphs or diphthongs in print. For example, aerial does not use, Oedipus does not use, and tableau does not use. Also, it is normal to use the letter for the broken vowel in i-d-ea-s or c-r-ea-t-e, despite it being pronounced as two sounds rather than one as in head or ocean.
Ligatures should not be used for acronyms that are pronounced as a string of letters. That is, DEA should not use the letter, nor PST the letter. Such letters are acceptable in acronyms that are pronounced as a word, however, if the result is not obscure.
The letters of the fifth decade are often used in the past tense and other grammatical forms: when rub becomes rubbed, in braille the letter is moved down a dot to indicate the bb. However, those letters which double as punctuation marks——may only occur sandwiched in the middle of a word, not at the beginning or end, in order to avoid confusion with the punctuation. That is, *sea, ebb, add, cuff, egg must be spelled out in full, though the ligatures are used in season, added, cuffs, and eggs. Because of legibility problems, they may not come in contact with an apostrophe or hyphen either. That is, in egg's and egg-plant, tea's and tea-time, the gg and ea must be spelled out in full. If the print letters span an obvious affix, the braille ligature is not used, but they are used in words such as accept and address where the morphology has become opaque. In order to keep the spelling regular, compounds of words starting with ea keep the ea spelled out: uneasy, anteater, southeast do not use the ligature because easy, eater, east do not use it. These are the least-preferred ligatures: any other will be used instead. Thus wedding is w-ed-d-ing and office is of-f-i-c-e.
Many of the rules for when to use ligatures, contractions, and abbreviations differ when a word is divided at the end of a line of text, because some of them may not come in contact with the hyphen that divides the word. See the references for details.
The accent mark shows that there is a diacritic on the following letter, as in señor, façade, café, naïve, and ångström. In normal braille text, noting the precise diacritic is not important, as it can be easily understood from context, or simply ignored. Where diacritics are critical, technical braille transcription must be used.
A diacritic in a word of foreign origin prevents the accented letter from combining with another into a ligature. For example, señor is not written with the ligature as *, because it would not be clear if the accent were supposed to be on the e or on the n. However, English words are contracted. Thus ' is written, and ' is.