Braille kanji

Braille Kanji (Japanese: 漢点字, Hepburn: Kantenji, lit. Chinese dot characters) is a system of braille for transcribing written Japanese. It was devised in 1969 by Tai'ichi Kawakami (川上 泰一), a teacher at the Osaka School for the Blind, and was still being revised in 1991. It supplements Japanese Braille by providing a means of directly encoding kanji characters without having to first convert them to kana. It uses an 8-dot braille cell, with the lower six dots corresponding to the cells of standard Japanese Braille, and the upper two dots indicating the constituent parts of the kanji. The upper dots are numbered 0 (upper left) and 7 (upper right), the opposite convention of 8-dot braille in Western countries, where the extra dots are added to the bottom of the cell. A kanji will be transcribed by anywhere from one to three braille cells.