An overview of IPA Braille: An updated tactile representation of the International Phonetic Alphabet

Abstract

This article provides an overview of IPA Braille, revised and updated by Englebretson (2008) under the auspices of the International Council on English Braille (ICEB). After a brief introduction to braille as a writing system and a review of the disparate braille notations formerly used for phonetics, the author discusses the need for a single, up-to-date, linguistically-informed braille notation for the IPA. The author then outlines the rationale and procedures used in developing IPA Braille, and presents an appendix of the complete charts showing the braille equivalents for all symbols of the current IPA (revised to 2005). This article is relevant to phoneticians interested in applications of the IPA, linguists interested in writing systems, instructors who may have blind students enrolled in phonetics and linguistics courses, and especially to blind students and professionals needing access to a complete, updated braille IPA notation. The publication of the full braille charts inJIPAensures that IPA Braille is available to the wider community of phoneticians and linguists, who typically do not have access to the literature from specialized braille publishing houses.