Rules and Guidelines for Vietnamese Braille Grade 0 Uncontracted

To help interested people have a more convenient source of reference, Sao Mai team would like to share this series, introducing tables of codes and rules for Vietnamese Braille. We welcome all feedback and suggestions via our email at support@saomaicenter.org.

Braille is a tactile writing system using 6 dots in each rectangular block, including dots 1, 2, 3 from top to bottom in the left column and dots 4, 5, 6 in the right column. So, with a block, we can present 64 characters (including the "space"). As in daily printed documents, there are thousands of different characters, people need some sets of codes and their writing rules to convert a particular text into Braile.

Nowadays, many English-speaking countries already have a common Braille code standard called UEB (Unified English Braille). In Vietnam, however, much effort has been made to create a "unified Vietnamese Braille" but with all those improvements, people just can use Braille in simple documents. For more complicated characters used in technical documents or music sheets, there are still a lot of controversies. In this article, we would like to introduce a set of Braille code tables that is currently used widely in Vietnam. At the beginning of each table, together with the rules, we present related information about the characters listed.

Please note, in order to read the "Shown in display" column properly, you need to have a Braille font installed on your computer. If you haven't had one, you can download Simbraille at SIMBRL.ttf.

Vietnamese Alphabet

At first, the Vietnamese Braille letter "đ" was written as "d" in the Latin Braille (dots 145) and the letter "d" was written as "z" in the Latin Braille (dots 1356). However, these rules were changed later to avoid conflicts with the Latin Braille, which means putting back the "d" and "z" to their original places and creating a new code for "đ" as 2346.

Tone Letters

Rules:

1. Put the tone letters right before the first vowels and after the consonants (if any). For example: luyến = l-acute-u-y-ê-n.
2. There are two exceptions in words containing the consonants "qu" and "gi". In these cases, tone letters are placed after "u" and "i". For example, quán = q-u-acute-a-n.

Numbers

1. Put the number indicator before the number in Braille. For example: 1 = 3456-1 (3456 is the number indicator).
2. The Braille codes for the numbers 1234567890 are the same as the codes for abcdefghij. Therefore, using a number indicator helps distinguish the numbers and letters.

Formatting Marks

Use formatting marks as in the following examples:

Example 1: A (capital A) = 46-1 (46 is the capital letter formatting sign).

Example 2: number 10 = 3456-1-245

Example 3: 12a (12 a in lower case) = 3456-1-12-6-1 (6 is the lowercase letter formatting sign). This sign needs to be provided especially when a number is written beside a letter.

Example 4: VIỆT NAM (all capitals) = 456-1236-6-24-126-2345 456-1345-1-134 (456 is the capital word formatting sign).

Example 5: TOÀN BỘ ĐƯỢC VIẾT HOA = put the capital paragraph formatting sign 46-46 right before the letter "t" in the word "toàn" and the end-of-capital formatting sign 46-13 after the letter "a" in the word "hoa".

Symbol and Punctuation