Braille Trivia
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47 free Braille trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Oct 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 47 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which toy was adapted in 2019 so that its pieces spell out braille letters and numbers?
Lego bricks
Lego bricks: each Braille Brick keeps only the studs that spell one character and prints the same letter beside them, so blind and sighted children can build and learn side by side.
Q 02How does English braille show a capital letter?
A sign before it
A sign before it: a single dot at the foot of a cell says 'capital follows', just as a number sign ahead of a letter turns it into a digit.
Q 03How old was Louis Braille when he worked out his code?
Fifteen
Fifteen: by 1824 Braille had built the code in his free time from an army captain's clumsier system of dots, and his classmates took it up at once.
Q 04How did Louis Braille lose his sight?
An awl accident in his father's workshop
An awl accident in his father's workshop: aged three, he drove the leather punch into one eye, infection spread to the other, and by five he was completely blind.
Q 05Louis Braille's birthplace, Coupvray, east of France's capital, now sits beside which attraction?
Disneyland Paris
Disneyland Paris: the resort was laid out across five villages, Coupvray among them, so some of its hotels now stand a short drive from the house where Braille was born.
Q 06Alongside their braille, what told gold from silver on the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic medals?
Indents on the edge
Indents on the edge: one for gold, two for silver, three for bronze, so athletes with sight loss could tell their medals apart by touch, while the face spelled 'Tokyo 2020' in braille.
Q 07What made Louis Braille halve an older code's twelve dots?
Fingertip size
Fingertip size: the old twelve-dot symbols were taller than the pad of a finger, so readers had to feel up and down each one, while a six-dot cell is read at a single touch.
Q 08Before braille, how did books at Louis Braille's school let blind pupils read?
Letters embossed into heavy paper
Letters embossed into heavy paper, the method of founder Valentin Haüy, were slow to read and impossible to write by hand; ironically, Braille's own 1829 book explaining his dots was printed this way.
Q 09Braille's 1829 system used dots and what other element, dropped by the 1837 edition?
Dashes
Dashes: Braille's first published alphabet mixed them with dots, but fingers could not easily tell the two apart, so his 1837 edition kept dots alone.
Q 10Alongside teaching, which job did Louis Braille hold for years in Paris churches?
Organist
Organist: Braille won school prizes for cello and piano, played the organ at Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs from 1834, and made sure his dot code could write music as well as words.
Q 11The first full-length book printed in braille, in 1837, was a schoolbook on what subject?
French history
French history: the Précis sur l'histoire de France came out in Braille's dots from his own Paris institute, yet three years later a new director set about curbing the code's use there.
Q 12Louis Braille died at 43 after years of a lung illness that doctors diagnosed as what?
Tuberculosis
Tuberculosis: he lived with the illness for well over a decade, was forced to give up teaching, and died in Paris two days after his forty-third birthday.
Q 13When France reburied Louis Braille among its national heroes, which part of him stayed in his home village?
His hands
Q 21The classic braille typewriter of 1951 is named after which American school for the blind, where Helen Keller studied?
Perkins
Perkins: teacher David Abraham finished the prototype in 1941, but wartime limits on manufacturing kept the Perkins Brailler off the market for another ten years.
Q 22Abraham Nemeth, steered away from the subject by his college advisers, went on to devise a braille code for what?
Mathematics
Mathematics: his college advisers pushed him into psychology, but Nemeth went back for a maths doctorate and devised the code he needed to do the work himself.
Q 23How can braille be embossed on both sides of one sheet?
The two sides' dots are offset
His hands: they stayed in an urn on his original grave in Coupvray as a symbolic gesture, while the rest of his remains went to Paris a century after his death.
Q 14Louis Braille's school made his code official only at what point?
Two years after his death
Two years after his death, in 1854: pupils had taken up his dots almost at once, but the school's officials took three decades to follow.
Q 15Which country's blind schools used rival codes into the 1910s before settling on braille?
The United States
The United States: its schools were split between braille, New York Point and other raised types for decades after a Paris congress of 1878 had backed braille as the international standard.
Q 16Which part of the cell do the first ten braille letters, a to j, use?
Only the upper four dots
Only the upper four dots: Braille then made k to t by adding one lower dot to the same ten shapes, so a learner who knows ten letters is well on the way to twenty.
Q 17Hebrew and Arabic print starts at the right-hand margin; which way is braille in those languages read?
Left to right
Left to right: Hebrew and Arabic braille follow the international convention set by the French original, so a blind reader's fingers travel the opposite way to the printed line.
Q 18Why was w left out of Louis Braille's original sequence?
It was not then a French letter
It was not then a French letter: French uses w only in borrowed words such as wagon, so Braille left it out, and it was added later, out of sequence, as a j with one extra dot.
Q 19In braille, the cell for the letter j also stands for which digit?
0
0: the letters a to i double as the digits 1 to 9, and j, the tenth letter, stands for zero once the cell is marked as a number.
Q 20What is the traditional hand tool for writing braille, punching each dot in mirror image from the back?
A slate and stylus
A slate and stylus: because each dot is pushed out through the back of the page, the writer works from right to left so that the text reads normally once the paper is turned over.
The two sides' dots are offset: in 'interpoint' printing each dot on the back lands in a gap between dots on the front, which cuts the paper a bulky braille book needs.
Q 24In contracted English braille, which everyday word shrinks to just the letters a-f-n?
Afternoon
Afternoon: short forms like afn are why almost all English braille books are contracted, since braille cells are far bulkier than print and every saved cell saves paper.
Q 25What was uncontracted braille previously known as?
Grade 1
Grade 1 spelled every word out letter by letter; grade 2 added the contractions that nearly all books use to save space, and grade 3 was a loose personal shorthand that was never standardised.
Q 26Which men's magazine did the US Library of Congress begin publishing in braille, articles only, in 1970?
Playboy
Playboy: Congress withheld the funding in 1985, but a federal judge ruled the next year that dropping the braille edition violated blind readers' First Amendment rights.
Q 27Eight-dot braille, used on computer displays, adds its two extra dots where?
Below the bottom row
Below the bottom row: the cell grows to four dots high, giving 256 patterns, enough for every keyboard character, capitals included, to fit in a single cell.
Q 28Valentin Haüy, founder of the Paris school where Louis Braille later studied, found his first pupil doing what?
Begging for alms
Begging for alms: Haüy met young François Lesueur in 1784 and made him his first pupil, and the boy learned so quickly that backers soon helped Haüy open a school.
Q 29What does a refreshable braille display use to form characters?
Pins that rise and fall
Pins that rise and fall: round-tipped pins push up through holes in a flat strip to form each cell, then reset to show the next stretch of text, so one short row can display a whole document.
Q 30What special treatment do braille books and letters for blind readers get in the US mail?
Free postage
Free postage: braille volumes are far bulkier than print, so 'free matter for the blind' spares readers the cost, and postal services around the world offer the same exemption.