Braille Art: Dot Art to Copy and Paste, and How It Works

Braille art, also called dot art, is a picture drawn with Unicode braille characters. Each of the 256 braille patterns, from U+2800 to U+28FF, is a grid of up to eight dots, two across and four down, so every character works like a tiny block of eight pixels; line them up in rows and the dots draw a shape (Unicode Standard, ch. 21). It looks like braille, but it isn't: the patterns are picked for their shape, not their meaning, so it spells nothing, and a screen reader such as NVDA reads it as dot numbers or skips it. To write real braille, use a braille translator.

That is the short answer. Below are dot art pictures you can copy and paste, how braille art generators turn an image into dots, what dot art sounds like to a screen reader, and how to share it without leaving anyone out. Every source was checked on October 29, 2026.

Key points

• Dot art is made of real characters. Unicode has 256 braille patterns, U+2800 to U+28FF, one for every combination of up to eight dots.
• Each character is a 2 × 4 block of pixels. Every dot can be on or off, so one character can draw eight separate points of a picture.
• Generators work like a stencil. They shrink the image, turn it gray, and make each pixel brighter than a cutoff into a dot.
• It isn't braille. Unicode says there is no fixed link between a dot pattern and a letter, and in dot art the patterns spell nothing.
• Screen readers can't see the picture. NVDA, for example, names each character by its dots, like "braille 1 2 5", or leaves it out, depending on its settings.
• Share it as an image with alt text, or put a short description in words before it.
• There is also braille art you can feel, brailled on paper with a Perkins Brailler.

Dot art and real braille at a glance

Both use the same 256 Unicode characters. What differs is what the dots are for. The Unicode Standard says there is "no fixed correspondence between a dot pattern and a character" of any script, and that giving the patterns a meaning is outside its scope (Unicode Standard, ch. 21). Braille codes give them meaning; dot art ignores it.

What is braille art?

Braille art is the braille cousin of ASCII art. The W3C describes ASCII art as characters "arranged to form pictures, pictures of text, or graphs" (W3C, technique H86). Dot art does the same with braille characters. Because each one is a fixed grid of up to eight dots, a single character can draw eight separate points instead of one letter shape.

The characters weren't made for drawing. Unicode encoded the 256 patterns so that braille input and output devices could exchange braille data (Unicode Standard, ch. 21). They arrived with Unicode 3.0, and Windows has supported them since Windows 7 (Alan Wood). Programmers also use them to draw on text-only screens: the drawille library describes itself as "Drawing in terminal with Unicode Braille characters" (drawille).

Dot art to copy and paste

Select a picture, copy it and paste it. Each one is made only of braille characters, including the blank pattern for empty space.

A heart (11 characters wide, 3 lines):

⣴⣿⣿⣿⣦⣤⣴⣿⣿⣿⣦
⠙⠿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⠿⠋
⠀⠀⠀⠉⠛⠿⠛⠉⠀⠀⠀

A smiley face (12 characters wide, 6 lines):

⠀⠀⣠⠴⠒⠛⠛⠒⠦⣄⠀⠀
⢀⡞⠁⢀⡀⠀⠀⢀⡀⠈⢳⡀
⣼⠀⠀⠙⠋⠀⠀⠙⠋⠀⠀⣧
⢻⠀⠰⣆⠀⠀⠀⠀⣰⠆⠀⡟
⠈⢧⡀⠈⠳⠦⠴⠞⠁⢀⡼⠁
⠀⠀⠙⠲⠤⣤⣤⠤⠖⠋⠀⠀

If it looks wrong on your screen: empty boxes or a skewed picture come from the font. Which braille characters show up depends on your browser and the fonts installed (Alan Wood), and dot art can shift between apps and devices (Accessible Social). For the fonts that include braille, see braille font.

Make your own. These characters fill whole rows, columns or halves of a block, which makes them handy for drawing by hand (UnicodeData):

The 64 six-dot patterns, ready to copy one by one, are in braille symbols.

How does braille Unicode work?

Unicode numbers the dots of a cell 1, 2 and 3 down the left column and 4, 5 and 6 down the right, with dots 7 and 8 added underneath (Unicode Standard, ch. 21). That makes a grid two dots wide and four tall. Each dot adds a value to the code:

Add up the dots you want and add the total to U+2800. The middle of the heart above, ⣤, has dots 3, 6, 7 and 8: 4 + 32 + 64 + 128 = 228, which is E4 in hexadecimal, so the character is U+28E4. Its official name is just its dots, "BRAILLE PATTERN DOTS-3678" (UnicodeData). With no dots at all you get U+2800, BRAILLE PATTERN BLANK, which Unicode classes as a symbol, not a space.

To a drawing program, those eight dots are eight pixels. Drawille keeps exactly this table: the top-left pixel of each character is worth 1, the one beside it 8, and so on down to 128 for the bottom right, all added onto U+2800 (drawille). That's why dot art has twice as many pixels across as it has characters, and four times as many down.

How does a braille art generator work?

Here is how one generator does it: ascii-image-converter, an open-source tool whose code anyone can read (ascii-image-converter):

1. Shrink the image. You choose the width in characters. In braille mode the tool resizes the picture to twice that many pixels across and four times as many down, "because one braille character has 8 dots (4 rows and 2 columns)", as a comment in its code puts it.
2. Turn it gray. Each pixel becomes a brightness from 0 (black) to 255 (white).
3. Apply a threshold. Each pixel at or above the threshold, 128 unless you change it, becomes a dot. With the negative option, it's the pixels at or below it.
4. Or dither. The dither option turns the picture into pure black and white with Floyd–Steinberg dithering and replaces the threshold. Since braille dots can only be on or off, the README explains, dithering makes the art more visible.
5. Add up each 2 × 4 block. Every block of eight pixels becomes one character: start at U+2800 and add the value of each dot. A block with no dots stays U+2800, the blank.

If a picture comes out too full or too empty, move the threshold; if shading gets lost, try dithering. How the result looks depends on where you view it: the tool's README warns that braille display "heavily depends on which terminal or font you're using".

Is braille art real braille?

No. It uses braille's characters but not its meaning. Unicode leaves meaning to each braille code and community (Unicode Standard, ch. 21), and dot art ignores the codes altogether. Here are the letters H and I drawn in dots:

⣿⣀⣿⠀⠉⣿⠉
⠿⠀⠿⠀⠤⠿⠤

That's 14 characters. In braille, the letters h and i are two cells: ⠓ (dots 1, 2 and 5) and ⠊ (dots 2 and 4) (Wikipedia: Braille ASCII). Embossed on paper, the dot-art version would be a row of cells that spell nothing, starting with ⣿, a cell with all eight dots raised.

Looking for a braille generator that turns text into braille? That's a translator, not an art tool. Our braille translator turns text into real braille characters you can copy.

Can a screen reader read braille art?

Not as a picture. To a screen reader, dot art is just a run of characters. As Accessible Social puts it, assistive devices "cannot properly discern" when characters are used to create illustrations (Accessible Social).

Here is what happens in NVDA, "a free and open source screen reader" for Windows (NVDA User Guide):

• Each character has a name made of its dots. NVDA's English symbol list calls ⠓ "braille 1 2 5" and ⣿ "braille 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8", and calls the blank "space" (NVDA symbols file).
• When NVDA reads a line, those names are spoken only at the "all" setting. The list sets no level for them, and in NVDA's code a symbol without a level counts as "all" (NVDA code). At that setting the heart above becomes a run like "braille 3 5 6 7 8, braille 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8…".
• At the default setting, a line of dot art is left out. NVDA's punctuation and symbol level starts at "some" (NVDA settings code), and below a symbol's level NVDA replaces it with a space.

Either way, the listener doesn't get a heart. Sense, a UK charity, warns in a guide by Steven Morris, who works on its campaigns and is deafblind, that stylised Unicode text is "often read out as symbols or individual characters by assistive technology" (Sense). For how blind people use screen readers day to day, see screen readers for the blind.

How to share dot art without leaving anyone out

• On social media, post it as an image with alt text. Accessible Social suggests making the art, taking a screenshot, uploading it as an image and adding alt text (Accessible Social). Most platforms have an alt text option, and alt text is read by screen readers and braille displays (Sense).
• If you post the characters, say what they are first. The W3C says ASCII art should come with a text explanation of what the picture is, and one of its examples puts that explanation before the art (W3C, technique H86). A few words like "dot art of a heart:" are enough.
• On a web page, mark it up as an image. The same W3C technique gives the art role="img" and an aria-label. That's how the pictures on this page are built: <pre role="img" aria-label="Dot art of a heart">. If you don't mark it up this way, the W3C suggests a link to skip over the art.
• Don't use it in place of words. Sense's guide lists decorative "fancy" fonts and ASCII art among the things to avoid in posts (Sense). A name, a title or a message spelled in braille characters or other symbols reaches a screen reader as a string of symbols, or as nothing.

What is Braille ASCII?

Dot art is sometimes called braille ASCII art, but Braille ASCII is something else. It's a way to store six-dot braille using 64 ordinary keyboard characters, ASCII codes 32 to 95, developed around 1969; letters stand for the same letters in braille, and many embossers take their input in it (Wikipedia: Braille ASCII). Punctuation marks stand for other braille signs: in the North American encoding, the "th" sign is a question mark, so the word "three" goes to the embosser as ?ree (Duxbury Systems). Opened in a word processor, a Braille ASCII file looks like a jumble of letters, numbers and punctuation.

Braille art you can feel

There is also braille art made for blind people: pictures brailled on paper, one cell at a time, with a Perkins Brailler. On Paths to Literacy, Edith West writes that these pieces promote braille literacy, help make accessible greeting cards and motivate students who are blind or visually impaired. She starts from a simple black-and-white image, decides between an outline and a silhouette, ignores "fine details that are simply visual", and builds curves by choosing cells by their slope (Paths to Literacy).

On the same site, Liz Eagan uses braille art as a stepping stone to tactile graphics: she and her student brailled a chicken, then added feathers and chicken food to it. She recommends the Perkins book Drawing With Your Perkins Brailler (Paths to Literacy). For more, see the Perkins Brailler, tactile graphics and braille greeting cards.

Where Braillito fits

Dot art borrows braille's characters but none of its meaning. Reading by touch means real braille (how blind people read), and braille is learned. Braillito, our app, teaches the braille cells in lessons with exercises you play, with lives, levels and a daily streak: 59 lessons in 8 worlds in English. It also has a translator, a dictionary and a cell builder. It is meant for anyone learning the code, such as sighted parents and teachers of a braille reader (learning braille as a sighted person) or adults who are losing their sight (learning braille as an adult).

Braillito is a subscription with no free version; depending on the plan, it starts with a free trial or a discounted first period, if it's your first subscription (is Braillito free?). Get Braillito.

Frequently asked questions

What is braille art?

A picture made of Unicode braille characters, also called dot art. Each character is a grid of up to eight dots, so rows of them can draw shapes. It looks like braille but doesn't spell anything.

How do I copy and paste dot art?

Select the picture, copy it and paste it like any text. If you see boxes or the picture looks skewed, the app or font you're pasting into doesn't show braille characters well.

Is braille art real braille?

No. It uses the same characters, but picks them for their shape, not their meaning. To write real braille, use a braille translator.

How do I make braille art from a picture?

Use a dot art generator. One like ascii-image-converter shrinks the image, turns it gray, makes every pixel brighter than a threshold into a dot, and turns each block of 2 × 4 pixels into one braille character.

Can blind people read braille art?

Not as a picture. A screen reader such as NVDA reads the characters as dot numbers, or skips them. Share dot art as an image with alt text, or describe it in words before the art.

What is a braille generator?

The term is used for two things: a dot art generator, which turns a picture into braille characters, and a braille translator, which turns text into real braille.

What is the blank braille character?

U+2800, BRAILLE PATTERN BLANK: the braille cell with no dots. Dot art uses it for empty space.