50 free Braille trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This braille trivia quiz covers the tactile writing system used by blind and visually impaired readers around the world, and the French teenager who invented it. It starts with Louis Braille himself: the awl in his father's harness workshop, the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, Charles Barbier's twelve-dot night writing, the six-dot cell he unveiled at fifteen, the 1829 and 1837 publications, his career as an organist, his death two days after his 43rd birthday and the odd fate of his hands. The rest of the quiz is about the system and how it is used: the 64 possible patterns, how the alphabet is built in decades, why the same cell means both d and 4, contractions and grade levels, slates and styluses, the Perkins Brailler, eight-dot braille, Unicode, refreshable displays, and the raised dots on Canadian banknotes, euro coins, British polymer notes, UK medicine boxes and the Helen Keller quarter. It ends with World Braille Day and the asteroid named after the inventor. Questions range from easy to expert. Every answer was checked against the Wikipedia articles on braille and Louis Braille.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01How many raised dot positions make up a standard braille cell?
Six
They are arranged in a 3-by-2 matrix, numbered 1 to 3 down the left column and 4 to 6 down the right.
Q 02How many possible patterns can a six-dot braille cell form, counting the empty cell used as a space?
64
Because there are only 64, most braille characters carry several meanings depending on context.
Q 03How old was Louis Braille when he developed his code in 1824?
Fifteen
He was still a student at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris when he presented it to his peers.
Q 04How did Louis Braille lose his sight?
An awl accident in his father's workshop
He was three when the awl glanced off the leather into one eye; the infection spread to the other and he was fully blind by five.
Q 05In which small town about twenty miles east of Paris was Louis Braille born in 1809?
Coupvray
His childhood home there is now a museum, and the town square was renamed Braille Square.
Q 06Whose tactile code, later known as 'night writing', inspired Louis Braille?
Charles Barbier
Barbier's system used up to twelve dots for 36 sounds; Braille cut it to six dots that fit under one fingertip and stood for letters, not sounds.
Q 07How many embossed dots did each symbol use in Barbier's original system?
Twelve
Braille objected that a 12-dot symbol could not fit under the pad of a reading finger, slowing reading down.
Q 08Which school, founded by Valentin Haüy, did Louis Braille attend from 1819 and later teach at?
The Royal Institute for Blind Youth
Haüy taught reading with heavy paper embossed with raised Latin letters; the school owned three books when it opened.
Q 09Braille's 1829 system used dots and what other element, dropped by the 1837 edition?
Dashes
The dashes were too hard to tell apart by touch; the 1837 revision is described as the first binary form of writing of the modern era.
Q 10Which two instruments did Louis Braille play as an accomplished musician?
Cello and organ
He was organist at the Church of Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs in Paris from 1834 to 1839, and his system included musical notation from the start.
Q 11Which subjects did Louis Braille teach as a professor at the Institute?
History, geometry and algebra
He was made a full professor in 1833 and stayed at the school for most of his life.
Q 12How old was Louis Braille when he died of a respiratory illness in 1852?
43
He died two days after his birthday, having lived with what was long believed to be tuberculosis for 16 years.
Q 13Which part of Louis Braille was left in his home town when his remains moved to the Panthéon?
His hands
They were reverently buried near his childhood home in a symbolic gesture.
Q 21How many keys does a standard braille writing machine have?
Six
One key per dot; the first widely accepted braille typewriter was Frank Haven Hall's, presented in 1892.
Q 22Who produced the 1951 braille typewriter that became the best-known machine of its kind?
David Abraham, a woodworking teacher
He worked at the Perkins School for the Blind, and the Perkins Brailler that bears its name fits up to 42 cells per line.
Q 23What was DOTSYS, written by Robert Mann at MIT in 1960?
Software for automatic braille translation
Q 14In what year did the Institute finally adopt Braille's system, at the insistence of its blind pupils?
1854
That was two years after his death; a rival teacher, Pierre-Armand Dufau, had banned it in 1840 before it was reintroduced in 1844.
Q 15In what year was braille officially adopted by schools for the blind in the United States?
1916
Dr. Armitage had complained in 1882 that North America was the last holdout; a universal English braille code followed in 1932.
Q 16Which part of the cell do the first ten braille letters, a to j, use?
Only the upper four dots
The same ten cells double as the digits 1 to 9 and 0 when preceded by the number sign.
Q 17How are the letters k to t formed from a to j in braille?
By adding a dot at position 3
The next decade adds dots at both 3 and 6, and w was tacked on at the end because it was not in the French alphabet of Braille's day.
Q 18Why was the letter w left out of Louis Braille's original alphabetical sequence?
It was not in the French alphabet of his day
It was eventually added at the end of the 39-letter French series to accommodate English.
Q 19In braille, the same cell that means the letter d also stands for which digit?
4
A number sign placed before a cell switches it from letter to digit, since a-j double as 1-9 and 0.
Q 20What is the traditional hand tool for writing braille, punching each dot in mirror image from the back?
A slate and stylus
Mistakes can be rubbed out with a braille eraser or overwritten with all six dots.
DOTSYS III, from the Mitre Corporation, became the first braille translator written in a portable programming language.
Q 24What is 'interpoint' in braille printing?
Embossing both sides of the paper with the dots offset
The dots on one side sit between the divots that form the dots on the other, halving the paper needed.
Q 25In English contracted braille, the word 'afternoon' is written with how many letters?
Three
It becomes 'afn', much like stenoscript; the letter for 'and' can also appear inside words like 'grand'.
Q 26What was uncontracted braille previously known as?
Grade 1
Contracted braille was grade 2, and grade 3 refers to non-standardised personal shorthands.
Q 27How many characters fit on a line of a standard 11-by-11.5-inch braille page?
43
With 25 lines per page, that is why almost all English braille books are transcribed in contracted braille to save space.
Q 28By the 2020s, braille codes existed for roughly how many languages?
Over 133
Unified English Braille has been adopted by all seven International Council on English Braille member countries plus Nigeria.
Q 29Where are the two additional positions placed in eight-dot braille?
At the bottom of the cell, numbered 7 and 8
That gives 256 combinations, enough to encode every printable ASCII character, including letter case, in one cell.
Q 30In which Unicode version was the braille pattern block added?
3.0 in 1999
The block runs from U+2800 to U+28FF and encodes patterns by their binary appearance rather than their alphabetical order.