Why Dots & Signs
Who made it, how, and what it doesn’t do.
Dots & Signs was born on 21 October 2026 from a simple idea: to introduce Braille and the sign language alphabet to children and adults, in every language, in a way that works for people who can see, people who can’t see and people who can’t hear.
Why
In Italian there was only one printable sheet and a few articles; the online games were almost all in English, and hardly ever designed for blind people too. Braille also changes from one language to another, and so do sign languages: each language here uses the table from its official organisation, listed at the bottom of every page.
How it’s made
The Braille tables come from official documents: UICI for Italian, ICEB and BANA for English (UEB), ONCE for Spanish, the Code Braille Français Uniformisé for French, BSKDL for German, and the Grafia Braille of the Brazilian Ministry of Education for Portuguese. A program compares them letter by letter with liblouis, the open tables used by screen readers. The LIS fingerspelling alphabet comes from Ca’ Foscari’s Grammatica della LIS (2022), the American one from Gallaudet University sources; we draw the hands ourselves.
The website was built by Ciro Simone Irmici with the help of artificial intelligence; he checks the tables, hands and texts himself. The fingerspelling alphabets are still awaiting review by a deaf signer: if that’s you, write to us.
What it doesn’t do
It doesn’t teach contracted Braille, maths or music in Braille, or real sign language (grammar, signs, expression): for that you need deaf teachers. It doesn’t ask for an account and doesn’t collect data: the name you write stays on your device.