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For example, the phrase "you and me" in Braille looks like this:

Notice that the cells for each letter within a word are separated by a little bit of space; a larger space (essentially a cell with no raised dots) is used between words.

This is the basis of Braille as Louis Braille devised it, or at least as it applies to the letters of the Latin alphabet. Louis Braille also devised codes for letters with accent marks, common in French. Notice that there's no code for w, which isn't used in classical French. (Don't worry. The letter will show up eventually.) At this point, only 25 of the 64 possible codes have been accounted for.

Upon close examination, you'll discover that the three rows of Braille illustrated above show a pattern. The first row (letters a through j) uses only the top four spots in the cell—dots 1, 2, 4, and 5. The second row duplicates the first row except that dot 3 is also raised. The third row is the same except that dots 3 and 6 are raised.

Since the days of Louis Braille, the Braille code has been expanded in various ways. Currently the system used most often in published material in English is called Grade 2 Braille. Grade 2 Braille uses many contractions in order to save trees and to speed reading. For example, if letter codes appear by themselves, they stand for common words. The following three rows (including a "completed" third row) show these word codes:

Thus, the phrase "you and me" can be written in Grade 2 Braille as this:

So far, I've described 31 codes—the no-raised-dots space between words and the 3 rows of 10 codes for letters and words. We're still not close to the 64 codes that are theoretically available. In Grade 2 Braille, as we shall see, nothing is wasted.

First, we can use the codes for letters a through j combined with a raised dot 6. These are used mostly for contractions of letters within words and also include w and another word abbreviation:

For example, the word "about" can be written in Grade 2 Braille this way:

Second, we can take the codes for letters a through j and "lower" them to use only dots 2, 3, 5, and 6. These codes are used for some punctuation marks and contractions, depending on context:

The first four of these codes are the comma, semicolon, colon, and period. Notice that the same code is used for both left and right parentheses but that two different codes are used for open and closed quotation marks.

We're up to 51 codes so far. The following 6 codes use various unused combinations of dots 3, 4, 5, and 6 to represent contractions and some additional punctuation:

The code for "ble" is very important because when it's not part of a word, it means that the codes that follow should be interpreted as numbers. These number codes are the same as those for letters a through j:

Thus, this sequence of codes means the number 256.

If you've been keeping track, we need 7 more codes to reach the maximum of 64. Here they are:

The first (a raised dot 4) is used as an accent indicator. The others are used as prefixes for some contractions and also for some other purposes: When dots 4 and 6 are raised (the fifth code in this row), the code is a decimal point in numbers or an emphasis indicator, depending on context. When dots 5 and 6 are raised, the code is a letter indicator that counterbalances a number indicator.

And finally (if you've been wondering how Braille encodes capital letters) we have dot 6—the capital indicator. This signals that the letter that follows is uppercase. For example, we can write the name of the original creator of this system as

This is a capital indicator, the letter l, the contraction ou, the letters i and s, a space, another capital indicator, and the letters b, r, a, i, l, l, and e. (In actual use, the name might be abbreviated even more by eliminating the last two letters, which aren't pronounced.)

In summary, we've seen how six binary elements (the dots) yield 64 possible codes and no more. It just so happens that many of these 64 codes perform double duty