American Braille was a popular

braille Braille (Pronounced: ) is a tactile writing system used by people who are visually impaired, including people who are Blindness, blind, Deafblindness, deafblind or who have low vision. It can be read either on Paper embossing, embossed paper ...

alphabet used in the United States before the adoption of standardized

English Braille English Braille, also known as ''Grade 2 Braille'', is the braille alphabet used for English. It consists of around 250 letters ( phonograms), numerals, punctuation, formatting marks, contractions, and abbreviations (logograms). Some English Bra ...

in 1918. It was developed by Joel W. Smith, a blind piano tuning teacher at

Perkins Institution for the Blind Perkins School for the Blind, in Watertown, Massachusetts, was founded in 1829 and is the oldest school for the blind in the United States. It has also been known as the Perkins Institution for the Blind. Perkins manufactures its own Perkins Br ...

Boston Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- mo ...

, and introduced in 1878 as ''Modified Braille''. In 1900 it was renamed ''American Braille''. Rather than ordering the letters numerically, as was done in

French Braille French Braille is the original braille alphabet, and the basis of all others. The alphabetic order of French has become the basis of the international braille convention, used by most braille alphabets around the world. However, only the 25 basic ...

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 The slate and stylus are tools used by blind people to write text that they can read without assistance.Alpha Chi Omega (1908) Invented by Charles Barbier as the tool for writing letters that could be read by touch, the slate and stylus allow fo ...

, 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:The New York Institute for Special Education,
American Modified Braille
'' 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.

References

Sources

* {{Braille Frequency-based braille alphabets