Braille ASCII: Full 64-Cell Table, BRF and Computer Braille

Braille ASCII is a way to write six-dot braille with ordinary keyboard characters: each of the 64 possible braille cells is paired with one of the 64 printable ASCII characters, from the space to the underscore. The letters keep their cells, so A is dot 1, but most other characters stand for a braille cell rather than for their print meaning: ? is the th cell, so ?REE is "three" in contracted braille. Braille ASCII is what's inside a BRF file, the format of digital braille books, and what embossers and braille displays receive from a computer.

Below: the full table of all 64 cells with their dots and their meaning in Unified English Braille (UEB), what a BRF file is and who uses it, what dots 7 and 8 add in eight-dot computer braille, what happened to Computer Braille Code, and how Braille ASCII differs from Unicode braille. Sources were checked on October 30, 2026.

Key points

• 64 characters, 64 cells. Braille ASCII uses the printable ASCII characters from the space (code 32) to the underscore (code 95), one per six-dot cell, blank cell included.
• It stores braille, not print. The text is already translated: contractions, capital indicators and numeric indicators are in it. "Braille ASCII" in contracted UEB is ,BRL ,,ASCII.
• BRF is Braille ASCII laid out in pages. Duxbury calls the format "something of an industry standard." Bookshare offers its books as BRF, and the braille eReaders of the National Library Service (NLS) read BRF files.
• Eight-dot computer braille adds dots 7 and 8. In the North American Braille Computer Code, as BRLTTY's table defines it, dot 7 marks capitals and dot 8 marks control and accented characters. The Braille Authority of North America (BANA) says there has never been a standard for eight-dot braille ASCII.
• Computer Braille Code is retired. BANA says it is no longer an official code in the US: UEB replaced it in January 2016.
• Unicode braille is a different thing. It has 256 characters of its own, U+2800 to U+28FF, that show as dots in ordinary text. Braille ASCII is letters and punctuation until a braille font or a braille device turns it into dots.

Braille ASCII and related terms at a glance

What is Braille ASCII?

A braille cell has six dots, and each dot is raised or not, so there are 64 possible cells, counting the blank one. Braille ASCII gives each of them one printable ASCII character, from the space (code 32) to the underscore (code 95). liblouis, the open-source braille translation library used by the NVDA screen reader and by Braillito's translator, calls its table "Braille ASCII, or more formally, The North American Braille ASCII Code," and notes that it defines only 64 dot combinations of dots 1 to 6.

The pairing follows the cells, not the print meaning of the characters:

• Letters are their own cells. A is dot 1, B is dots 1 and 2, and so on.
• Digits are the lower cells. The digit cells are the cells of a to j moved down one row: 1 is dot 2, 2 is dots 2 and 3. In UEB those lower cells are punctuation and contractions, so 1 in a UEB file is a comma or the ea contraction, never the number one.
• Punctuation stands for contractions and signs. ? is the th cell, & is the word and, , is the capital indicator.

Duxbury's documentation gives an example: the th sign is a question mark, so to emboss "three" in contracted braille, the computer sends ?ree to the embosser. Here are a few more, with the cells liblouis's UEB tables produce:

Numbers start with #, the numeric indicator, followed by the letters a to j: 2026 is #BJBF. A capital letter is , before the letter, and ,, capitalizes a whole word.

Braille ASCII isn't a braille code. It doesn't decide what a cell means; UEB, Nemeth or another code does that. It's only a way to store and send cells as plain text. BANA's 2020 position paper puts it this way about Computer Braille Code: it "uses braille ASCII as its basis," but "the two are not one and the same." The same paper says embossers and refreshable braille devices receive their input in six- or eight-dot braille ASCII, and that braille translation software imports and exports it.

Other countries have their own pairings. Duxbury's embosser settings list British, French, German, North American English and Spanish encodings, and say most people use the North American one. This article is about the North American table, the one inside BRF files.

The full Braille ASCII table: all 64 cells

The three tables below give every character, its cell and its dots, from the liblouis table (version 3.39.0). We checked it cell by cell against the table in Braillito's translator: they match. The last column is what the cell means in Unified English Braille, the code the US has used since 2016, in contracted (Grade 2) braille. The examples in that column are in Braille ASCII, and liblouis's UEB tables produced every one of them. "Alone" means the cell standing as a whole word.

A cell can mean several things depending on where it stands, and a table can't hold every rule. The full code is in the free Rules of Unified English Braille (see free braille resources), and the contractions are explained in braille contractions.

Letters: A to Z

The liblouis table uses capitals for the letters, and BRF files are usually shown that way, but it's the same cell either way: Duxbury's own example writes ?ree in lowercase, and Braillito's translator reads lowercase letters as the same cells. A capital letter in print is marked with the capital indicator , (dot 6), not with an uppercase character.

Digits: 0 to 9

Punctuation and symbols

Where the sources disagree: six dots or eight

The six-dot table above is the one in BRF files, in liblouis's en-us-brf.dis and in Braillito's translator. Eight-dot computer braille starts from the same cells but doesn't give them all the same characters. The North American Braille Computer Code table that liblouis ships as text_nabcc.dis, described there as the default text table of BRLTTY, needs room for lowercase letters and for ` { | } ~, so it puts them on six-dot cells and moves their uppercase partners to the same cell plus dot 7. We compared the two tables by script: 31 of the 64 cells differ.

So a file that says @ means dot 4 in a BRF but dots 4 and 7 in eight-dot NABCC. BANA's position paper adds that eight-dot braille ASCII can represent 256 characters, "although there has never been a standard for doing this." If a program shows the wrong characters for a braille file, check which of the two tables it expects.

What is a BRF file?

A BRF file (Braille Ready Format) is a text file in Braille ASCII that holds braille already translated and laid out in pages. Duxbury, the braille translation software, calls BRF one of its long-standing file formats and describes BRF files as relatively simple "ASCII braille" text files that represent finished braille pages, line by line and page by page, using the North American convention, and calls the format "something of an industry standard."

What that means in practice:

• It's already contracted. The words are in braille, not in print: the is ! and and is &.
• It's already formatted. Line breaks, page breaks and page numbers are in the file, so it must match the device. Duxbury says the line width "must be exactly correct" and that most BRF files mark the end of each page. Its example embosser uses 42 cells per line and 26 lines per page; a W3C draft on braille formatting gives 40 cells as the standard line. Check what your display or embosser expects.
• It's plain text. Any text editor opens it, but you'll see letters and punctuation, like ,BRL ,,ASCII, not dots. A refreshable braille display or a braille embosser turns it into braille you can touch.

Who uses BRF files

• The National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled (NLS). Its BARD service offers books, magazines and music in audio and electronic braille, and NLS lends refreshable braille displays to read them. Its NLS Braille eReaders, made by Zoomax and HumanWare, read BRF files as well as Word, HTML, DAISY and PDF.
• Bookshare. Its books come in BRF for braille note takers and refreshable displays: you choose "brf" as the download format.
• iPhone users. Braille Access, in iOS 26 and later, opens and creates BRF files on a connected display (see braille on iPhone).
• Braille rulebooks. ICEB offers the Rules of Unified English Braille as free BRF volumes as well as PDF (free braille resources).
• Transcribers. Duxbury says one of the main uses of BRF import is re-translating older braille, for example to update it to UEB.

Eight-dot computer braille: what dots 7 and 8 do

Six dots give 64 cells, too few for the 95 printable ASCII characters once lowercase and capital letters are both counted. Eight-dot braille adds two dots below the six, numbered 7 and 8, which raises the number of patterns to 256. Unicode encodes all of them as "a single complete set of 256 eight-dot patterns."

In the eight-dot North American Braille Computer Code as BRLTTY's table defines it:

• Lowercase letters keep their six-dot cells. a is dot 1, z is 1-3-5-6.
• Dot 7 makes the capital. A is ⡁, dots 1 and 7, so a capital needs no capital indicator and takes one cell, like on screen. The table also uses dot 7 to tell apart pairs such as @ and `.
• Dot 8 is for control and accented characters. The table extends the code to the Latin-1 character set this way.

That's why it's called computer braille: one character, one cell, with nothing contracted, so a password, a file name or a line of code reads exactly as typed. Screen readers use dots 7 and 8 for other jobs too. In the NVDA user guide (version 2026.3):

• Selection: selected text is marked with dots 7 and 8, ⣀, on by default.
• Line wrap: when a word is cut at the end of the display, the last cell shows dots 7 and 8 as a continuation mark.
• Formatting: formatting tags use dot 7 for "end": b is "Start bold" and b with dot 7, ⡃, is "End bold."
• Typing: on a braille keyboard, dot 7 erases the last cell typed and dot 8 translates the input and presses Enter.
• Computer braille on demand: an option shows the word under the cursor in uncontracted computer braille, while the rest of the line stays contracted.

BANA's 2020 position paper asks software makers not to default to braille ASCII when a reader has chosen UEB, to expand the word at the cursor to uncontracted UEB rather than to braille ASCII, and to offer eight-dot braille ASCII as an option. It notes that menus and passwords shown in braille ASCII "can create confusion" for readers who learned UEB.

What happened to Computer Braille Code?

Computer Braille Code (CBC) was BANA's code for computer material, developed in the 1980s so that things like code, email addresses and file names could be transcribed exactly. On its CBC page, BANA says it is no longer an official code in the United States: "It was replaced by Unified English Braille (UEB) in January 2016." The files stay online for reference only.

BANA's 2020 position paper adds:

• UEB covers it. "All of the symbols and modes represented in CBC can be unambiguously represented in UEB."
• It won't change. CBC won't be updated, stays in BANA's archives and isn't taught.
• Transcribers use UEB. CBC is no longer used in general transcriptions for electronic addresses, file names or screenshots; UEB's rules (section 10.12.3) and the Guidelines for Technical Material (section 17) cover computer material.

Braille ASCII didn't go away with CBC. It's still how a computer sends braille to an embosser or a display, and how BRF books are stored. What changed is the code inside: since 2016, the cells in a new US braille file are UEB. Older files may still use the earlier code, EBAE, which had contractions UEB dropped (what changed with UEB).

Braille ASCII vs Unicode braille

Both write braille cells as text, but they're built for different jobs.

The key difference: a Braille ASCII character is still a letter or a punctuation mark. Pasted into a web page, ?REE shows as a question mark and three letters, unless the page sets a font that draws each character as dots. BANA's paper notes that braille ASCII is also used to display simulated braille on web pages. Unicode braille characters are dot patterns themselves, so ⠹⠗⠑⠑ shows as dots wherever a font has the block, and most systems include one (braille font).

Unicode is deliberately neutral: its standard says there is no fixed correspondence between a dot pattern and a character of any script, and that assigning meanings is outside its scope. So ⠹ is "BRAILLE PATTERN DOTS-1456" in Unicode, th in UEB, and ? in Braille ASCII. The blank pattern, U+2800, is also different from a space: Unicode's chart says it "does not act as a space," while in Braille ASCII the blank cell is the ordinary space.

Converting between them is a lookup: find the cell's dots in the table above, then add up the dot values (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 for dots 1 to 6, and 64 and 128 for dots 7 and 8) to U+2800. h, dots 1, 2 and 5, is 1 + 2 + 16 = 19, so U+2813, ⠓, which is H in Braille ASCII.

Convert text to Braille ASCII with Braillito's translator

The English braille translator on this site does both directions in the browser, with the same liblouis UEB tables used for this article:

1. Type or paste English and choose Grade 1 (uncontracted) or Grade 2 (contracted).
2. Tick "Show as Braille ASCII" to see the result as ,BRL ,,ASCII instead of dots, then "Copy" it.
3. Download the result. "Download .brf" saves it in North American Braille ASCII, the format US embossers read, with lines broken at spaces. "Download .txt" saves the dots as Unicode braille.
4. Go the other way. Paste braille cells, dot numbers or Braille ASCII into the braille box to read it as English. If the input could be read two ways, a button offers "Read as Braille ASCII instead."

Its limits: up to 5,000 characters at a time, and the .brf has lines of up to 40 cells but no page breaks or page numbers, so it's a line-wrapped file, not a page-formatted book. Both files are made in your browser and your text isn't uploaded. Use them for practice or drafts; for anything a blind reader will rely on, have a certified transcriber check it.

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. 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 ASCII?

A way to write six-dot braille as plain text. Each of the 64 possible cells is one printable ASCII character, from the space to the underscore: letters are their own cells, and digits and punctuation stand for other cells, such as ? for th. It's the format of BRF files and what embossers and braille displays receive.

How many characters does Braille ASCII have?

64: the printable ASCII characters from code 32 (space) to code 95 (underscore), one for each six-dot cell, blank cell included. Lowercase letters and the characters ` { | } ~ aren't part of the six-dot set; eight-dot computer braille adds them with dots 7 and 8.

What is a BRF file?

A Braille Ready Format file: Braille ASCII text that holds braille already translated and laid out in lines and pages. Bookshare offers its books as BRF, and the NLS Braille eReaders read BRF files; you read them on a refreshable braille display or emboss them on paper. Opened in a text editor, it shows letters and punctuation.

What is the difference between Braille ASCII and Unicode braille?

Braille ASCII uses 64 ordinary characters that stand for six-dot cells, so it shows as letters and punctuation unless a braille font or device turns it into dots. Unicode braille has 256 characters of its own, U+2800 to U+28FF, that show as dots in ordinary text, for six or eight dots.

What is 8-dot braille?

Braille with two more dots below the six, numbered 7 and 8, for 256 patterns. Computers and braille displays use it so that each character on screen gets one cell: in the North American Braille Computer Code, dot 7 marks capitals and dot 8 control and accented characters. Screen readers also use dots 7 and 8 for the cursor and selected text.

Is Computer Braille Code still used?

Not for new transcriptions in the US. BANA says Computer Braille Code is no longer official: UEB replaced it in January 2016, and UEB can represent all of its symbols. Braille ASCII, a different thing, is still used every day in BRF files, embossers and displays.