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Braille Art

Turns a photograph into Unicode braille cells — 2 × 4 dots per character, eight times the resolution of a brightness ramp — with a choice of dithering.

A brightness ramp gets one value per character. A braille cell gets eight, because U+2800 and its 255 neighbours encode a 2 × 4 grid of dots inside a single character — so a 100-column braille picture carries 200 × 400 bits where a 100-column ASCII picture carries 100 × 50 grey levels. That is the whole reason it looks like the photograph and ASCII art looks like a texture. It is also, deliberately, not readable braille.

🔒 Runs entirely in your browserasciiartimagebrailleconvert

Drop an image

PNG, JPEG, WebP, GIF or SVG. Decoded in this tab and never uploaded.

This is not readable braille. It is a picture that happens to use the braille block as a 2 × 4 pixel grid, and a braille display or a screen reader will read it as gibberish. The 점자 변환 tool is the one that transcribes text.
Eight dots per character is eight times the resolution of a brightness ramp, which is why this looks like the photograph and ASCII art looks like a texture. U+2800–28FF renders everywhere — DejaVu, Menlo, Consolas, Noto, Segoe UI Symbol, and every font a Linux desktop ships — because accessibility software needs it. That is the practical reason to prefer it to the sextant and octant block characters, which are newer than most installed fonts.
Some fonts draw the unset dots of a cell as faint marks rather than as blank space, so the picture may arrive with a dot grid behind it. That is the font rather than the encoding, and there is nothing this page can do about it.

How to use it

  1. Pick the dithering to match the picture

    Floyd–Steinberg for a photograph — it pushes each dot’s rounding error into its neighbours, which is what makes one bit per dot look like a continuous tone. Threshold for line art, a logo or text, where diffusion only adds noise. Ordered for anything that will become an animation, because it dithers each frame independently and a still background then stays still.

  2. Match the invert switch to the background

    A raised dot is ink. On a dark terminal ink is bright, on white paper ink is dark, so the same photograph needs opposite settings depending on where it is going. Getting it backwards gives a photographic negative, which is why it is a switch and not an assumption.

Common questions

Will a blind person be able to read this?

No, and please do not send it as if they could. This uses the braille block as a pixel grid; the cells spell nothing. A braille display will render it as a wall of meaningless characters and a screen reader will read out nonsense. The 점자 변환 tool on this site is the one that actually transcribes text, article by article from the 2017 한국 점자 규정.

Why is there a faint grid of dots behind my picture?

Some fonts draw the *unset* dots of a braille cell as faint marks rather than as blank space, because that is what a printed braille page looks like. It is the font, not the encoding, and nothing this page does can change it. Exporting as PNG in a font that does not do it is the way out.

Why braille rather than the newer block characters?

Coverage. The sextant and octant characters give the same or better resolution and are from 2020 and 2024, so most installed fonts do not have them and most people would see boxes. U+2800–28FF has been in every serious font for decades because accessibility software needs it, so braille art arrives intact in Discord, KakaoTalk and a git commit message.

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