Braille pattern dots-23678

A dot pattern; the braille code gives it meaning. A braille cell numbers its dots 1-2-3 down the left column and 4-5-6 down the right; eight-dot braille adds dot 7 under the left column and dot 8 under the right. Unicode encodes every possible pattern as a shape, not as a letter, so ⣦ means whatever the code of a given language or field assigns to it.

Its top six dots form ⠦ (dots 2-3-6), the question mark in English braille. Dots 7 and 8 were added for computer braille, so that one cell could carry a full computer character set.

Braille itself grew out of 1821, when French officer Charles Barbier showed his raised-dot "night writing" at the Paris school for blind children where young Louis Braille studied. Braille shrank the cell and made it spell letters, publishing his system in 1829.

Why does it turn up in text art?

Each cell works as a tiny grid of 2×4 pixels. Because Unicode has all 256 patterns, people and programs use braille characters to draw pictures, faces, memes and charts in plain text. ⣦ is a lower-left-heavy tile, handy for the bottom edge of a shape.

On a screen a font draws the dots; nothing is raised, and a blind reader's screen reader may read such art out as a string of dot patterns. Some fonts show it as empty boxes.