This site contains links to resources for students, scholars, and teachers who wish to study and teach ancient languages using braille. These resources are primarily aimed at those using refreshable braille displays to access digital primary source texts.
Each language/language group has a page that identifies recommended translation tables, a page with sample texts to ensure the tables are working properly, and a page with links to digital text and linguistic resources that can be accessed using these tables.
For help enabling multilingual braille support in your screen reader, see instructions for activating ancient language braille tables.
NOTE: support for ancient language braille tables is not yet fully integrated into all available screen readers. Current support is indicated on the page for each language. Please continue to check back if your preferred screen reader is not included.
Beginners’ Guides for Teachers and Students
If you are a blind or visually impaired student interested in learning ancient Languages using braille or if you are an instructor teaching blind and visually impaired students, please refer to the following guides:
Braille Code Charts and Sample Texts
Cuneiform (and Other) Transliteration
Sumerian and Akkadian transliteration and Normalization Code
Digital Resources for Transliterated Cuneiform
Classical and Biblical Hebrew
Classical and Koine Greek
Classical and Koine Greek Braille Codes
Classical and Koine Greek sample text
Coptic
Credits
This site was created as part of the Digital Accessibility for Blind Scholars of Antiquity project at Stanford University, which started with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and was concluded with funding from Stanford University and the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis.
The project created braille translation tables for the open-source braille translation engine LibLouis. LibLouis can be integrated into other translation software and its tables are included in in a number of commercially and freely available screen readers (JAWS, NVDA, and VoiceOver, among others).
The LibLouis braille tables referenced on this site were created by DABSA project members Eric J. Harvey and Sarah Blake LaRose, along with LibLouis community members including Leonard De Ruijter, Matthew Yeater, and Paul Geoghegan. Full information regarding creators and contributors to prior versions of the tables can be found in the LibLouis documentation on Github.
All materials on this site were created by Eric J. Harvey.
© 2025 by Eric J. Harvey. Published under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.