Braille Pattern Dots 7–8

Its reading comes from the Braille code in use. Braille is tactile writing made of raised-dot cells. ⣀ marks dots 7 and 8, the extra positions in an eight-dot cell; the code assigns that pattern a letter or other sign.

Braille followed earlier tactile methods for blind readers. In 1786, Valentin Haüy published an embossed book with raised letters. In 1821, Charles Barbier presented a twelve-dot system at a Paris school for blind students. Louis Braille began developing his six-dot code small enough to read by fingertip in 1824 and published it in 1829. In the United States, several tactile systems competed from the 1880s through 1919, when English Braille was selected as a standard. Eight-dot Braille extends the cell for computer and specialist notation.