Braille Services

Our team is happy to review your content and advise on any adjustments needed to make it suitable for braille transcription, ensuring clarity and accessibility.

Both grade 1 and 2 braille use sequences of raised dots to represent text. Grade 1 includes letters, numbers, and some symbols, whereas grade 2 utilises contractions – symbols that represent common letter combinations and high frequency words, as well as more complex symbols.

Grade 1 is usually learnt first and built upon, and so children or those new to accessing braille will tend to use grade 1. Once they have more experience, learners will move on to grade 2. Public signs, and crucial information such as braille on hazardous or pharmaceutical material packaging will be in grade 1.

The braille labels we use are clear, with permanent adhesive and good durability for outdoor use. The labels can be applied over existing signage and documents including standard business cards without obscuring the printed content. If you’d like to receive some sample labels to test this for yourself, please get in touch.

Yes, in a number of ways. Tactile diagrams can be used to provide a touch-based representation of maps, diagrams (including charts and graphs), and simplified images. Sometimes a description is more appropriate and useful to the target audience.

We can offer standard size and folded business cards – these can be short or long edge fold, which either open horizontally to a wide rectangle, or vertically to a taller rectangle.

Each panel can fit 4 lines of braille; each line can fit 13 braille characters. Capitals, special characters, and spaces must be included in this count.

For example, “A B C” would be 8 characters in grade 1, 1 symbol to denote every capital (3 characters), 2 spaces between (adding to 5 characters), and then 1 character for each letter. However, due to contractions used in grade 2, “A B C” would be more characters, as we need to indicate that these are letters, and not contractions. The character for ‘c’ for example is used as a contraction of the word ‘can’.

Our email address in grade 2 braille, “post@pia.co.uk” would have characters for ‘p’ ‘o’ ‘st’, two characters for the @ sign, ‘p’ ‘i’ ‘a’ ‘.’ ‘c’ ‘o’ ‘.’ ‘u’ ‘k’ – totalling 14 characters.

Your existing printed artwork can remain the same, containing standard text and logos.

The key to deciding what information to include in braille, is being clear about the action you want recipients to take. Is it best for them to call you, would an email be better, or are you encouraging them to access your website? If your name is long, and your email includes your name, these two pieces of information alone could be too much for four lines of braille, and so perhaps choosing a folded business card works for you, or using your email only – and including a short link or QR code.

Our standard paper for braille documents is 130 grams per square metre (gsm) white paper. This can be rapidly embossed by one of our automated machines. For thicker card, we use manual feed embossers, which one of our Producers will operate and monitor, ensuring accurate and firm embossing.

Whilst we have a general guide of our upper limit for embossing – 350 gsm – this can be exceeded depending upon the qualities of the particular cardstock required. If provided with sample card, we can test your chosen stock to ensure the braille dots meet the required depth standard.

Some speciality finishes can pose issues for embossing, for example it is possible that gold foil may slightly crack when embossed. We’re always happy to discuss requirements, so if you have a speciality product in mind and aren’t sure if your vision will work with braille, please get in touch.