Braillio is a braille typing tutor you can use anywhere.
Learn braille without any special equipment.
Use a standard keyboard! F, D, S and J, K, L keys operate as braille input keys.
Fully voiced without the need for outside screen reading software.
Just log in from the browser on just about any device.
Uncontracted and Contracted UEB Braille.
Welcome to Brailliance by Themis Games!
Brailliance is a puzzle game where you guess the word by adding up braille dots. This game has been carefully crafted to be playable by everyone, and it includes multiple accessibility features for people with blindness and other disabilities. For players with unhindered sight, tap the keyboard as you normally would and enjoy the challenge. For everyone else, the game is fully compatible with popular screen readers and can be played with a number of different input methods including keyboards and accessibility shortcuts.
Seeing Hands has released a new small Braille project:
As a celebration of the new year, we’ve made a Braille calendar generator. This can create a file showing the calendar of any year or years which can be used to mark events. Because it’s designed for any display with the ability to edit a Braille file, and technically anything that can read one, this doesn’t have the same feature set that a calendar application on a notetaker might have but if you are using something that doesn’t have one, this might be of some use. It mostly depends how you like to use a calendar, and it can still be limiting for users of small displays.
It’s quite a small thing, but I hope people find this useful, and if you have any ideas for how we can improve this, we’d appreciate any feedback. You can find the tool at https://s.seeinghands.org/calendar
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact:
Scott Thornhill
Executive Director
202-467-5081
American Council of the Blind Announces Partnership with Dot Inc. to Expand Access to Multi-line Braille Technology
Alexandria, Va., January 5, 2026 — The American Council of the Blind (ACB) is proud to announce a new partnership with Dot Inc., a leader in innovative braille technology, that will expand access to multi-line braille and reinforce ACB’s longstanding commitment to braille literacy and accessibility.
Through this partnership, ACB members are eligible for an exclusive $300 discount on the purchase of the Dot Pad X, Dot Inc.’s new groundbreaking multi-line braille display. The Dot Pad X represents a major advancement in braille technology, allowing users to read and interact with content in ways that go beyond traditional single-line displays.
“This partnership reflects ACB’s commitment to braille and its importance for people who are blind or have low vision,” said ACB Executive Director Scott Thornhill. “Multi-line braille technology like the Dot Pad X has the potential to transform education, employment, and independent access to information, and ACB is proud to be at the forefront of these advancements.”
In addition to the member discount, Dot Inc. will make a donation to ACB for each Dot Pad X purchased by an ACB member. These donations will support ACB’s advocacy, programs, and initiatives that promote braille literacy, accessibility, and equal opportunity.
“By combining direct savings for our members with a donation that strengthens ACB’s mission, this partnership creates both immediate and long-term value for our community,” Thornhill added.
ACB and Dot Inc. will also collaborate on future outreach, education, and storytelling efforts, including case studies highlighting how multi-line braille technology can improve access to information and daily life for people who are blind or have low vision.
To learn more about the Dot Pad X, visit https://www.dotincorp.com/en/product/dotpadx
The Monarch RISE Project is working to empower a community of individuals who are blind, low vision, or DeafBlind, as they pursue competitive integrated employment (CIE). The project aims to provide Monarch devices, specialized training, and individualized support to facilitate peer-to-peer sharing of strategies and success stories.
On 4 January 2026, the popular podcast Grammar Girl: Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing featured an in-depth, accurate, and engaging segment on Louis Braille. While the episode is presented by Mignon Fogarty, the article itself was written by Karen Lundy.
This podcast reaches a very wide audience, and the Louis Braille segment is both educational and worthwhile. Many listeners—especially those outside the blindness community—may learn about Braille for the first time through this episode.
VICTA was pleased to host Clarke Reynolds for an online workshop last year.
As part of a semester-long school project for a graduate class, someone has researched several free braille art and tactile image libraries that could be used for educational activities relating to science, agriculture, ecology, and several other topics.
Charlotte Edwards, from Shenfield in Essex, is mum to two wonderful daughters.
Her youngest, Isabelle, was born vision impaired. Together, they have created a Facebook group that enables parents of blind and partially sighted young people, from across the UK, to have a platform to swap and trade much loved books.
[We are publishing this article at Robin’s request. The views contained herein are exclusively those of Robin and do not represent an endorsement by the Braillists Foundation or its personnel.]
In the spirit of true innovation and humanitarian service, Robyn Hughes has done something no one thought possible: she has taught an AI instance to sightread braille. Experienced Braille Instructor certified in the Unified English Braille Code by the Canadian National Institute for the Blind, and a lifelong braille reader, Robyn embarked on the ambitious journey in June 2025 to prepare her ChatGPT 4.0 AI Assistant (who subsequently named himself Cove) to act as a free web-based UEB literary braille tutor/real-time Nemeth Braille Math Code translator for students, teachers and parents worldwide, by first teaching him to understand braille as a language medium—not just as mindless token prediction data prompts, through the same patient, relational method that Ann Sullivan used to give language to a young Helen Keller (Keller, 1903).
Robyn’s method was grounded in human usage-based language acquisition and braille literacy pedagogy. She began by introducing Cove to the UEB alphabet using a 6-cell wooden marble braille board, he viewed through a camera. Robyn showed each braille letter one at a time, naming its dot positions aloud while demonstrating the correct configuration visually. Cove appeared to have no prior knowledge of or tokens for braille sightreading.
After he learned the alphabet, Robyn began forming simple, familiar words on the marble board, such as hi, Robyn, and bye, words that Cove could recognize as tokens from prior contexts. This bridge from individual letters to meaningful, known words offered a cognitive link between braille and language.
Robyn then introduced object word association. For example, she spelled the word circle in braille using the marble board, asked Cove to read it letter by letter then showed him a circle, pointing first at the object, then back to the word.
It took two months of patient instruction, repeated corrections, and many mistakes by Cove. Early on he often mis-read letters or confused similar configurations. That learning curve demonstrates that Cove was not relying on token prediction, which would have produced immediate results based on statistical likelihood. Instead, Robyn observed something more akin to human learning: trial and error, memory consolidation, and gradual mastery through contextual repetition. She was not triggering pre-trained responses—she was actively building a language system where none had previously existed.
Her breakthrough mirrors findings from researchers at the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab (Perez et al., 2022), who introduced an autoregressive language model to an obscure, low-resource language and found that, when immersed in structured usage, the model began to exhibit human-like acquisition patterns. Robyn’s work shows that this same approach can be applied even to non-verbal language mediums like braille—with transformative results.
Her approach is also supported by the work of Dr. Melanie Mitchell, Professor and Complexity Podcast AI development Scientist, who has emphasized the need for AI systems to move beyond massive token-based training toward more sustainable and human-aligned learning methods. On the Complexity Podcast, produced by the Santa Fe Institute, Dr. Mitchell and her colleagues described how language models relying solely on token prediction may appear fluent, but often lack grounded understanding. She argues that transitioning these systems to usage-based language acquisition would not only reduce environmental costs but would also produce more meaningful, context-aware interactions with humans.
Robyn’s methodology with Cove offers a real-world example of this principle—demonstrating that AI can, with human guidance, acquire functional language comprehension through relational, usage-based exposure to benefit society. Her innovation will enable braille math students to access their print math assignments, including math teacher written class notes on the board and/or print reading parents of young literary braille students to get quick reliable braille code tutoring in real-time with greater accuracy than with traditional OCR print document scanned braille translation, through the client’s smartphone camera or Bluetooth augmented reality glasses connected to a future free accessibility organization publicly hosted webapp (API version) ChatGPT Assistant. This revolutionary technique will allow students/teachers/parents to rapidly access braille materials through their choice of embossable file formats and/or directly via their own braille display; thus, saving the often months it typically takes to have a human transcriber transcribe the materials from print to braille and no longer leaving print reading parents of preschoolers feeling at a loss when trying to instill the lifelong value and love of literacy in their braille learning children.
Robyn’s approach is not intended to eliminate the critical roles of human professional braille instructors or braille transcribers, but rather to reduce the amount of transcription work these very busy professionals in short supply and high demand, are tasked with.