Braille pattern 1-5-8

Read it in its Braille code. Braille is raised-dot writing read by touch. Unicode encodes the cell's shape; each language or notation system assigns its reading.

Before Braille, books used raised letters. Barbier proposed raised dots for blind readers in 1815; his 12-dot “night writing” for military messages in the dark was tried at a Paris school in 1821. Braille’s six-dot system appeared in 1829. Later eight-dot codes served Abreu’s Spanish music code (recognized in 1855), Japanese kantenji for kanji (Chinese-origin characters used in Japanese, developed by Taiji Kawakami in the 1950s), and stenographic shorthand (final version in 1961). Computer embossers arrived in the early 1970s; by 2013, refreshable displays made eight-dot codes more common.