What ⠄ means
In English Braille, ⠄ on its own is an apostrophe. A braille cell has six dot positions in two columns of three. They are numbered 1-2-3 down the left column and 4-5-6 down the right, so dot 3 is the lowest dot on the left.
Dot 3 is also a building block. English Braille's first ten letters, a to j, use only the top four dots; add dot 3 and you get the next ten, k to t. So (a) becomes (k). Other languages' braille codes assign their own meanings to cells, so check the code in use before reading ⠄ as an apostrophe.
Why does a braille dot appear in ordinary text?
Mostly as a pixel in dot-drawn text art. The Unicode braille characters cover every combination of up to eight dots, so people chain them into little pictures and graphs in chats, comments and terminals. There ⠄ means nothing beyond "one dot here". On a screen it is a picture of braille drawn by a font; blind readers feel raised dots on paper or on a refreshable braille display.
Part of the collection
Don't confuse it with
2
Related characters
2
Worth knowing
- Braille grew out of Charles Barbier's 1815 twelve-dot "night writing". Louis Braille met it at his Paris school for blind students in 1821, shrank it to six dots by 1824 and published his code in 1829.
Questions people ask
2Is ⠄ always an apostrophe?
No. That is its meaning alone in English Braille; inside a cell dot 3 helps form letters, and other braille codes use the cell differently.
Can blind people feel ⠄ on my screen?
No. It is a printed glyph. Screen readers may announce it as "dot 3" or send it to a refreshable braille display.
More like this
10
How to type or find ⠄
- Also called
- dot 3 · braille apostrophe · braille dot
- Search it as
- braille dot 3 · braille cell · braille pattern · U+2804
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
⠄\2804Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.