American Braille was a popular
braille
Braille (Pronounced: ) is a tactile writing system used by people who are visually impaired, including people who are blind, deafblind or who have low vision. It can be read either on embossed paper or by using refreshable braille displ ...
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 Br ...
in 1918. It was developed by Joel W. Smith, a blind piano tuning teacher at
Perkins Institution for the Blind in
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, 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