Braille dots 1-3-7-8

Three are on the left; one is at bottom right. Viewed from the reading side, an eight-dot Braille cell has two columns of four positions. The left column is numbered 1, 2, 3, 7 from top to bottom; the right is 4, 5, 6, 8. In ⣅, positions 1, 3, 7 and 8 are raised; the others are empty.

Braille is a system of raised dots read by touch. The number 1378 names the occupied positions, not a number to read aloud. To turn this pattern into a letter or another sign, you need the Braille code used in the original text. Unicode preserves the dot arrangement without assigning it a universal reading.

How did Braille get its dot cells?

Louis Braille adapted an earlier system of raised dots. Charles Barbier’s “night writing” used 12-dot cells and was designed for reading military messages in darkness. He presented it at a Paris school for blind students in 1821. Braille developed a six-dot cell small enough to fit under a fingertip and published his system for words and music in 1829.

Eight-dot Braille adds two positions beneath the six-dot cell. That gives 256 possible patterns, including the empty cell, compared with 64 in six-dot Braille.