Irish Braille is the

braille Braille (Pronounced: ) is a tactile writing system used by people who are visually impaired, including people who are blind, deafblind or who have low vision. It can be read either on embossed paper or by using refreshable braille disp ...

alphabet of the

Irish language Irish ( Standard Irish: ), also known as Gaelic, is a Goidelic language of the Insular Celtic branch of the Celtic language family, which is a part of the Indo-European language family. Irish is indigenous to the island of Ireland and was ...

. It is augmented by specifically Irish letters for vowels with acute accents in print: : ''é'' and ''ú'' are coincidentally the French Braille letters for ''é'' and ''ù'': They are simply the braille letters of the third decade after ''z'', assigned to print in alphabetical order. Irish Braille also uses some of the Grade- shortcuts of English Braille, : * only has the value ''ar'' in prose. In poetry, it is used to mark a new line, like "/" in print. †Abolished in Updated Irish Braille (see below) These shortcuts are not used across elements of compound words. For example, in ''uiscerian'' (uisce-rian) "aqueduct", ''e-r'' is spelled out, as is ''s-t'' in ''trastomhas'' (tras-tomhas) "diameter". There are no special braille letters for dotted consonants. The letter ''h'' is used instead, as in modern print. A shortcut may be used even when the final consonant is lenited with ''h''; ''comh'', for example, is written ''com-h''. The only word-sign is the letter ''s'' for ''agus'' "and". Traditionally the letters ''j k q v w x y z'' were not part of the

Irish alphabet Irish orthography is very etymological which allows the same written form to represent all dialects of Irish and remain regular. For example, ("head") may be read in Mayo and Ulster, in Galway, or in Munster. A spelling reform in the mid ...

, but apart from ''w'' they have been introduced through English loans, so they occur in Irish Braille. Punctuation is the same as in English Braille.

Updated Irish Braille

In 2014, the Irish National Braille and Alternative Format Association approved a new standard, Updated Irish Braille (UIB), designed largely to match

Unified English Braille Unified English Braille Code (UEBC, formerly UBC, now usually simply UEB) is an English language Braille code standard, developed to permit representing the wide variety of literary and technical material in use in the English-speaking world today ...

for ease of use by bilingual braille readers. UIB uses most of the contractions of UEB, with the exception of the doubled letters bb , cc , ff , and gg . These must be written as , , , and respectively. The contractions used are as shown above. A full set of wordsigns has been added: (Even when a lenited letter requires two cells, it is treated as one letter in Irish.) In addition, the letters ''a'', ''i'', ''á'', ''é'', ''í'', and ''ó'', along with the digraphs ''in'' and ''ar'', are Irish words in their own right, and are treated as wordsigns. The third-decade English wordsigns ''and'', ''for'', ''of'', ''the'', and ''with'' are not used as wordsigns nor as contractions. The first three are spelled out , , and , while the last two use the ''th'' contraction and . All occurrences of in UIB text are for vowels with accents. The only shortform word in UIB is ''b-r-l'' "braille".

References

*''Standard Irish (Gaeilge) Braille 2010'', National Council for the Blind of Ireland
Updated Irish Braille (UIB) Information , INBAF
{{Irish_linguistics French-ordered braille alphabets Irish language