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 … See more

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 … See more

Braille has several formatting marks, sometimes called "composition signs", "register marks", or "indicators", which have no one-to-one … See more

Apart from words using the various abbreviations signs, covered in the next section, English Braille utilizes a number of unmarked contractions. These are similar to the contractions … See more

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. See more

Braille punctuation is somewhat variable, just as there is variation in printed English between curly and straight quotation marks. They fail to make some distinctions found in print. For example, in EBAE, both opening and closing parentheses are written ⟨⠶⟩, with … See more

Besides unmarked contractions, words are abbreviated with any of several abbreviation signs. All of these signs use only the right-hand side of the braille cell. ⟨⠐⟩, ⟨⠘⟩, and ⟨⠸⟩ mark initial abbreviations, combining with the initial braille letter of a … See more