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.

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.

The following article in the Braille Monitor gives some basic information about IPA Braille: Englebretson, Robert. 2013. Braille and the IPA: Empowering careers in the language sciences. The Braille Monitor, 56: 2. https://nfb.org/images/nfb/publications/bm/bm13/bm1302/bm130211.htm

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).
• For an overview of braille as defined for many of the world's languages, see World Braille Usage, 3rd ed.

Relevant Software and Fonts

• The Gentium Plus 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 6.2 (ver. 1.4) MSK Keyboard from SIL International. Documentation is included in the download. The IPA SIL keyboard also works well on a number of platforms. This keyboard requires the use of the Keyman keyboard mapper. Additional keyboards for Windows, Mac, and Linux may be found at the IPA Unicode Keyboards page. 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 any of these methods to work with a screen reader, make sure you have all of the symbols defined in a character dictionary as described here for Jaws.

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