WeCapable Braille Translator

Spanish to Braille Translator

Spanish braille uses the international numbers marked by ⠼ pattern, just as in English braille.

Patterns in Spanish braille are quite similar to that in the French Braille, with the addition of a letter for ñ (⠻), slight modification of the accented letters and some differences in punctuation. The capital sign is the ⠨ pattern. The double capital sign does not exist in the Spanish braille. Also letter sign does not exists in the Spanish braille. As a result, single letters of the alphabet are not preceded by any sign unless they are italicized or capitalized.

Spanish braille does not use contractions. Therefore, at present, there is no Grade-2 Spanish braille.

Spanish language uses paired question and exclamation marks. The same convention is followed in Spanish braille script too.

Louis Braille: Inventor of the Braille Script

Modern Braille script was invented by a French inventor named Louis Braille. Louis was born in Coupvray, France on 04 January 1809. His father was a leather-maker. At the age of three, little Louis was playing in his father's workshop and he accidentally stuck a stitching awl in one of his eyes. Later, his injured eye got infected. Due to lack of antibiotics, soon, the infection spread to his other eye too. Gradually, by the age of five, the Louis Braille lost sight in both of his eyes.

Louis Braille studied at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris. There he met Charles Barbier -- the inventor of the night writing script (also a tactile script). Braille began working on a tactile script as an improvement over night writing. It took him two years but, in 1824, he finally created the Braille script with a six-dot system, in 1824, just at the age of 15 years. His headmaster gave him a dictation to test his new script. Louis wrote the entire article being dictated from the newspaper in his newly developed script and then read it back word-to-word.

Braille Alphabet: 6-dot Cell

The braille script designed by Louis Braille uses tactile patterns made with six raised dots arranged in a 3 x 2 matrix, called the braille cell. One or more braille cells may represent a letter, number, punctuation or a symbol. The following table shows the Unicode Braille characters representing various braille cells.

As per the international convention, braille is always written in left-to-right direction. This convention is followed even for the languages that are written right-to-left. For example, Arabic is written right-to-left, but Arabic braille is written left-to-right.