Braille Alphabet Chart

In short The braille alphabet is not twenty-six symbols to memorise. It is ten, plus two rules. The first ten letters, a to j, use only the four dots in the top two rows of the cell. Add dot 3 to each of them and you get k to t, in order. Add dots 3 and 6 instead and you get u, v, x, y and z. That is twenty-five of the twenty-six letters from ten facts, which is why braille can be learned far faster than it looks. The odd one out is w, dots 2-4-5-6, and the reason is historical rather than logical: Louis Braille was writing for French, which had no w, so the letter was appended later and fits none of the three groups. That is also why w sits between v and x in the chart but breaks the pattern there. The same trick generates the punctuation. Take one of the first ten letters and drop it one row, so dot 1 becomes dot 2 and dot 4 becomes dot 5, and you get the marks: a gives the comma, b the semicolon, c the colon, d the full stop, f the exclamation mark and h the question mark. Only the apostrophe and hyphen have to be learned separately. Enter a word above and each of its letters is shown with the rule that produced it.