SUL Sign Language and Braille
SUL is one language with four bodies: spoken, written, touched, and signed. Braille and sign reuse the same 12 letters and the same grammar - learning one form gives you most of the others for free.
Each stroke of the printed letter becomes three raised dots - both ends plus the midpoint - sitting exactly on the line they replace. If you can read the printed script, you already know the shape your fingertip is tracing.
| Letter | Printed | Braille | Overlaid | Hear |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| a | a | a | a | |
| e | e | e | e | |
| i | i | i | i | |
| o | o | o | o | |
| u | u | u | u | |
| t | t | t | t | |
| f | f | f | f | |
| s | s | s | s | |
| k | k | k | k | |
| g | g | g | g | |
| n | ana | ana | anadot above the start of the next letter | |
| w | awa | awa | awadash reaching back to the previous letter |
Because the dots sit on the strokes and both forms take exactly the same space on the page, braille is not printed separately - it is embossed straight onto the printed text. One line carries both:
Expanded - romanized
usnagufnafofwak
Expanded - printed
usnagufnafofwak
Expanded - braille
usnagufnafofwak
Expanded - embossed together
usnagufnafofwak
Collapsed - romanized
usnagufnafofwak
Collapsed - printed
usnagufnafofwak
Collapsed - braille
usnagufnafofwak
Collapsed - embossed together
usnagufnafofwak
"usnagufnafofwak" - "I do not want to eat" - one line, readable by eye and by fingertip. Everything above the text is a glue letter: a small dot is an n, the dash reaching back is a w.
One embossing serves every reader: every book is its own braille edition, sighted readers absorb braille without studying it, and blind readers feel the same letterforms sighted readers see.
Most vision loss comes late in life, and only about one in ten blind people ever master traditional braille's abstract patterns and contractions. A newly blind SUL reader learns nothing new: 12 letters they already know, each dot pattern tracing its printed shape, in naturally larger cells. And it works the other way - sighted people read the same dots by eye. Same page, shared.
Because the dots sit on the letters, tactile text costs nothing extra to make: the same artwork drives the ink and the bumps, and anything that can mold a raised logo can raise the dots.
Tactile text becomes the default everywhere, not an accommodation to retrofit.
Braille collapses letter pairs into single squares just like the condensed script: the dots simply trace the strokes of the collapsed printed square, so a collapsed cell reads the same under the fingertip as it looks to the eye.
Signed SUL is not a separate language either: same words, same order, same grammar. You sign a sentence exactly as you would say it. Every letter and number has a hand shape, so anything can be fingerspelled. Vowels are the number of extended fingers:
Fingerspelling is the fallback, not the language: every word also gets its own dedicated sign motion, recorded in the dictionary. The word motions are still being designed and will appear on dictionary pages as finished.
SUL braille is the printed alphabet with dots instead of lines - 12 letters you can read on day one.