American Braille was a popularbraille alphabet used in the United States before the adoption of standardizedEnglish Braille in 1918. It was developed by Joel W. Smith, a blind piano tuning teacher atPerkins Institution for the Blind inBoston, and introduced in 1878 asModified Braille. In 1900 it was renamedAmerican Braille.^[1]

Rather than ordering the letters numerically, as was done inFrench Braille and the (reordered) English Braille also used in the US at the time, in American Braille the letters were partially reassigned by frequency, with the most-common letters being written with the fewest dots. This significantly improved writing speed with theslate and stylus, which wrote one dot at a time, but lost its advantage with thebraille typewriters that became practical after 1950.

American Braille was the alphabet used byHelen Keller.^{[citation needed]}

In numerical order and with their modern French and English Braille equivalents, the letters are:^[2]

Letter
American Braille value	a	t	r	d	o	f	g	h	i	s	l	m	q
French/British Braille value		b	c		e					k
Letter
American Braille value	k	u	v	j	x	b	p	z	w	e	y	n	c
French/British Braille value	r			y	à · of	ê · gh	î · sh	ï · er		, · ea	@ · ar	NA ·-ing	j

Not quite half of the letters retained their French Braille values.

Punctuation was as follows. Comma, semicolon, and parentheses were the same as in English Braille.

Punctuation
American Braille value	Caps	.[3]	,	;	:	?	!	-[4]	( )	'[5]	"[6]
French/British Braille value	-				(NA)	.	with	:		(accent)	?

• Irwin, Robert (1955).As I Saw It. American Foundation for the Blind.

• Frequency-based braille alphabets

• Webarchive template wayback links
• Articles with short description
• Short description is different from Wikidata
• All articles with unsourced statements
• Articles with unsourced statements from October 2016