I didn’t really had much of a reason to learn braille honestly, let alone learning it digitally as the usefulness of it feels rather debatable. Despite that, I’ve somehow gotten interested in braille after stumbling upon a “cool” braille keyboard (more on that later) and thus started learning it on 25th of January 2024. Now, before getting into actually learning braille, it’s worth making the distinction between grade 1, grade 2, and grade 3 braille alongside the many languages that it offers. Firstly, the main difference between grade 1 & grade 2 braille would be the addition of contractions, lets take the word eating as an example. Grade 1 braille would have eating written as ⠑⠁⠞⠊⠝⠛ where
- e = ⠑
- a = ⠁
- t = ⠞
- i = ⠊
- n = ⠝
- g = ⠛
- e = ⠑
- a = ⠁
- t = ⠞
- ing = ⠹
There are a lot of these in grade 2 braille. Another example that I can give is with the word just where instead of writing it letter by letter (⠚⠥⠎⠞) it can just be shortened down to ⠚. In a nutshell, grade 1 have words written in the way that each and every letters are individually spelled out whereas grade 2 tries to simplify it down whenever possible. Now, what makes it different from grade 3 braille then? To be completely honest, I’m not too sure, but if I understand it correctly, grade 3 braille offers a lot more contractions alongside some of them that can even be personalised based off the individuals. This can sound rather daunting, but for the most part you should be able to get away with just knowing grade 2 as the usage of grade 3 (and even grade 1 to an extent) is rather uncommon.
Now, in regards to languages, there a lot (and I mean A LOT) of other languages that utilise braille, examples include German, French, Korea, Chinese, and even Arabic. Some might be even more unconventional such as Japanese where they have 2 different type of braille system, one for kana (katakana & hiragana) and the other for Kanji where the latter would feature 8 dots instead of the usual 6. Regardless, the one that I’ll be focusing on is UEB (Unified English Braille) which is the standard used when going over English braille. Worth noting that all of this is based of my understanding of my own understanding of the system, so the information may not be fully accurate as I’m still learner.
(Digitally) Learning Braille
Surprisingly, Learning braille (well, at least digitally) is a lot easier than people make it out to be in a way that you can probably pick up grade 1 braille in about 2-4 hours. The way I learned most of my braille is via Braille Academy. It's an amazing free mobile app that also works offline with the catch being that only grade 1 braille alphabets are free, numbers, punctuations, grade 2, etc are locked behind a one-time payment option (I believe it is around $5-$10). Despite that, I'd still recommend it in the way that if you just want to learn grade 1 braille then it'd be more than enough, but if you want to go a lot further then the pricing isn't that egregious.
Once you have grade 1 mastered or have some bases of grade 2 covered, then you can look into BRL for futher understanding of grade 2 braille and rules regarding the usage of it.
Other than that there are also a collection of braille apps located on Brailliac that were created and maintained by Luke Needham. While I haven't personally try all of them out, I'd say that the Braille Keyboard is a splendid & fun keyboard to use, albeit it can be rather buggy & seems to no longer be maintained. Nontherless, this keyboard was the original catalyst in me getting into braille and is something that I heavily appreciate the developer for. It’s rather unconventional, but still something worth using, especially if you're trying to learn grade 2 as it was something that have helped me immensely.
Conclusion
In conclusion, should you really learn braille digitally, not really? I do believe that learning braille was a rather fun experience for me & personally have resulted with me being inspired and more motivated in learning other things (eg: speedtyping on alternate keyboard layouts), but if you’re looking to actually learn something of potentially high usefulness, then you’re better off not bothering since at best this knowledge can only be used as a party trick of fun fact about yourself. Regardless, I do not for once regret my time with it since as stated before, learning braille was one of the activity that had originally kickstarted my enjoyment in learning a varied of things, plus the unremarkable feeling of seeing braille in the wild would always feel so surreal and I couldn’t have it any other way.