IPA Braille

IPA Braille, the official braille version of the International Phonetic Alphabet, is maintained by the International Council on English Braille at https://iceb.org/ipabraille. The current publication version (Englebretson, 2025) contains tactile graphic representations of each IPA character, alongside its braille equivalent. The ICEB IPA page contains mixed text and tactile graphic files that can be embossed on a variety of modern braille embossers, Word and PDF versions for print readers, and BRF versions suitable for reading on a braille display or downloading to a braille notetaker.

The following JIPA article provides an overview of the history and design of IPA Braille, and contains an appendix of the braille chart suitable for sighted individuals who wish to learn the system. 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. 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.

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).
• The LibLouis Braille Translator also contains IPA Braille tables. IPA Braille is supported in iOS, and in braille hardware and applications that use LibLouis.
• For a general introduction to braille and its place in the cognitive sciences, see Englebretson, Robert, M. Cay Holbrook, and Simon Fischer-Baum. 2023. "A position paper on researching braille in the cognitive sciences: De-centering the sighted norm". Journal of Applied Psycholinguistics, [Special Issue: Towards a Just and Equitable Applied Psycholinguistics], 44(3), 400-415.
• For an overview of braille as defined for many of the world's languages, see World Braille Usage, 3rd ed.

Relevant Software and Fonts

• 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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