IPA Braille

Developed by Dr. Robert Englebretson in conjunction with the International Council on English Braille.

IPA Braille was published by CNIB (Canadian National Institute for the Blind) under the auspices of the International Council on English Braille in April, 2008. BANA (the Braille Authority of North America) adopted IPA Braille as the authorized BANA code for phonetics in February 2010. The publication is available for free download at http://www.iceb.org/icebipa.htm. If you do not have a braille embosser and equipment to print the tactile images, you may also order a hardcopy from the Braille Institute of America (ordering information given at the above site).

The following JIPA article summarizes IPA Braille, and is intended for students, phoneticians, and linguists who have little to know experience with braille. Click here for a PDF. Full citation is:Englebretson, Robert. 2009. “An overview of IPA Braille: an updated tactile representation of the International Phonetic Alphabet.” Journal of the International Phonetic Association 39 (1): 67-86. (Copyright © Journal of the International Phonetic Association.)) Please note that if you print out the charts in the appendix, the first page needs to be printed in landscape orientation to keep it from being cut off.

If you have any questions related to the IPA and braille, please feel free to contact me at reng {at} rice.edu.

This section contains links to other resources related to braille, IPA, and accessibility for blind students and professionals in linguistics, along with software and fonts relevant to this project. Please e-mail me with suggestions to add to this list.

IPA, Linguistics, Braille, and Accessibility

• Instructions and JAWS character maps (by Robert Englebretson) explain how to enable the JAWS For Windows screen reader to read Unicode IPA characters.
• The Duxbury Braille Translator from Duxbury Systems supports translation of Unicode IPA characters into IPA Braille, as of DBT version 11.1 (January 2011).
• Dr. Sheri Wells-Jensen's home page contains lots of interesting links, including many relevant to braille and linguistics.

• The Doulos SIL Font is a Unicode font which is (in my opinion) the best font to use for IPA characters. It is fully Unicode compliant, works on both PC and Mac, and costs nothing to download and use. This font provides a full IPA Unicode character set, something which the Unicode fonts otherwise generally available in Windows do not have.
• My favorite way of typing IPA is using the IPA Unicode 5.1 (ver. 1.2 US) MSK Keyboard from SIL International. Documentation is included in the download. (In order for this to work with a screen reader, make sure you have all of the symbols defined in a character dictionary as described here for Jaws.)
• Another easy and completely accessible way to insert phonetic symbols into a Word document, for people who only need to insert occasional symbols rather than typing lots of IPA text, is to use Uniqoder written by Östen Dahl, and recently updated by Hans-Jörg Bibiko. This is a template for Microsoft Word which provides extra menus, toolbars, and macros for inputting phonetic symbols. Kudos to Östen Dahl for designing this extremely useful tool which also happens to be completely accessible for blind users using Jaws or other screen readers!
• For people who don't want to learn new keyboard layouts, or who simply want a quick and easy way of pasting Unicode IPA characters into a document, the IPA character picker is another useful means of input. (In order for this to work with a screen reader, make sure you have all of the symbols defined in a character dictionary as described here for Jaws.)
• There are numerous other entry methods available for entering IPA that work on PC, Mac, or Linux. Visit SIL International's character input page for more information.
• The SimBraille font, which simulates braille dots on the screen for sighted users, can be obtained directly from the Duxbury Systems Braille font download link

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