What does the Braille on this restroom sign say?

July 21, 2016 7:07 PM

A friend recently saw this bathroom sign in Utah; we agree that the imagery and wording for the sighted are pretty great. But what does the Braille say? Looks like the letters are ??WOME -- but transliterating doesn't really help me understand the text. I couldn't find anything similar on these ADA bathroom signs. Help?
posted by zebra to Writing & Language (5 answers total)

Best answer: It's the same as the indicators for this sign and the two dots in the front may indicate "all caps"
posted by jessamyn at 7:24 PM on July 21, 2016

Best answer: Here's a person on reddit explaining why it says that.
posted by jessamyn at 7:31 PM on July 21, 2016 [3 favorites]

Best answer: Yup, that just says WOMEN. Gotta love it when the braille doesn't quite match up with the sign ...
See this wikipedia article for the additional grade 2 braille symbols. Grade 1 is just literal transliteration letter-for-letter, Grade 2 adds some shortcuts, like "en" in that sign.

(In grade school, I may been obsessed with Helen Keller, and my mom was awesome and even bought me some braille books. I thought that would be a great way to read in bed after lights out, but I never got fast enough...)
posted by Metasyntactic at 9:04 PM on July 21, 2016 [5 favorites]

Response by poster: Thanks! Very strange that they wouldn't bother to properly annotate the Braille after doing a good job with everything else. (Or perhaps I shouldn't be surprised.)
posted by zebra at 9:51 PM on July 21, 2016

Maybe the new sign is just a vinyl decal placed over the old Women graphic.
posted by cabingirl at 4:57 AM on July 22, 2016 [5 favorites]