About

I’m totally blind and use screen readers on computers of all types (e.g., mobile devices and laptops). I hate typing on the virtual keyboard thus am limited on a mobile device (unless I carry around a large bluetooth keyboard).

By 2024, I had been blind more than 7 years and learned nearly nothing about braille. I had heard great things about the Hable One braille input device. I decided I’d get one to be more efficient on a mobile device and learn braille, at least for input.

Hable has great downloadable documentation in a variety of formats, including YouTube watch lists, but I wanted something I could access from any device and navigate quickly. So I started this site.

I toyed with structuring these reference pages into multiple pages with menus and sub-menus with each page focused on a narrow topic. For example, I had the grade one letters on a page and punctuation on a separate page. I had the Hable One split into three pages, common commands, iOS, and Android.

That was making the sphinx and pydata-sphinx-theme more complicated to configure with less accessible output, and navigation took longer than what I wanted to get to some basic information.

I decided to significantly simplify braille.codes by, at least for now, July 2025, keeping a very flat structure.

Each page now has more information though still related under a broad topic, e.g., Hable One. I’m very careful though to optimize accessibility using semantic HTML as much as possible (hint, lots of headings, tables including captions, and lists).

Infrastructure

I’m using GitHub Pages, including the custom domain feature (Configure a custom domain for your repo’s GitHub Pages), to host braille.codes.

The HTML is generated by sphinx with the content written in myst-parser markdown. The markdown and all sphinx configuration can be found in my braille repository on GitHub. Using GitHub Actions, when I commit and push to the main branch in the repo, sphinx is run and the resulting HTML is deployed automatically.

For better accessibility with sphinx, I’m using the theme pydata-sphinx-theme.

I bought the domain, braille.codes, from NameCheap which is mostly accessible with a screen reader, though usability could use some work. Their online support help me configure DNS to point https://braille.codes to the GitHub Pages for my braille repo. See the article, Configure DNS on NameCheap to link domain to GitHub Pages if you really enjoy the weeds.

Future?

My initial goal is to be able to use an iOS and an Android mobile device efficiently with the Hable One. As of July , 2025, braille.codes is very much manually created specifically based around my needs. Hopefully, others can find it useful.

As I was digging around in various braille organizations and GitHub repos looking for references, I ran across the liblouis project. It’s an amazing project supporting braille in many languages in what appears to be great depth. They have a directory of files with tables of braille references for various formats and uses (e.g., math). Someday I’d love to write something to parse those tables and generate this braille.codes site, at least the braille reference pages, automatically. We’ll see…

Feedback?

Please keep in mind I’m learning braille as I develop this site. It’s frustratingly ironic so much information for braille is published in PDFs. Most are mostly accessible, but still not a great usability experience. I am realizing braille is more than simply learning the patterns for the six dots. And I’m probably misunderstanding terminology, e.g., grade 1 vs grade 2, is it only about contractions?

I’d love to get feedback and suggestions for improvements. Constructive feedback is always the best, but any feedback making the site more useful is appreciated. I can be contacted at blindgumption@gmail.com.

Cheers!!