American Braille

American Braille was a popular braille alphabet used in the United States before the adoption of standardized English braille in 1918. It was developed by Joel W. Smith, a blind piano tuning teacher at Perkins Institution for the Blind in Boston, and introduced in 1878 as Modified Braille. In 1900 it was renamed American Braille.[1]

American Braille Modified Braille
Type	Alphabet
Languages	English
Time period	1878–1918
Parent systems	Braille (re-ordered) American Braille
Print basis	English alphabet

Rather than ordering the letters numerically, as was done in French Braille and the (reordered) English Braille also used in the US at the time, in American Braille the letters were partially reassigned by frequency, with the most-common letters being written with the fewest dots. This significantly improved writing speed with the slate and stylus, which wrote one dot at a time, but lost its advantage with the braille typewriters that became practical after 1950.

American Braille was the alphabet used by Helen Keller.

Letters

In numerical order and with their modern French and English Braille equivalents, the letters are:[2]

Letter
American Braille value	a	t	r	d	o	f	g	h	i	s	l	m	q
French/British Braille value		b	c		e					k
Letter
American Braille value	k	u	v	j	x	b	p	z	w	e	y	n	c
French/British Braille value	r			y	à · of	ê · gh	î · sh	ï · er		, · ea	@ · ar	NA · -ing	j

Not quite half of the letters retained their French Braille values.

Punctuation

Punctuation was as follows. Comma, semicolon, and parentheses were the same as in English Braille.

Punctuation
American Braille value	Caps	. [3]	,	;	:	?	!	- [4]	( )	’ [5]	" [6]
French/British Braille value	-				(NA)	.	with	:		(accent)	?

References

1. Irwin, p. 3.
2. The New York Institute for Special Education, American Modified Braille Archived 1996-10-18 at the Wayback Machine
3. ⟨⠤⟩ prefixed to a word capitalized it; suffixed to a word it was a period.
4. Doubled (⠒⠒) for a dash
5. Apostrophe only. Single quotation marks were ⠦⠦.
6. Doubled (⠦⠦) for single quotation marks. The reason for this was that in the US, single quotation marks were less frequent, being used where double quotation marks were in Britain.

Sources

• Irwin, Robert (1955). As I Saw It. American Foundation for the Blind.