Quadoo Alphabet

The Quadoo Alphabet, sometimes called square braille, is a tactile writing system developed by Alexander Fakoó in 2008 as an alternative to the Moon alphabet. It was designed in particular for handwritten note-taking by blind people, using a board with square holes. Its principle is based exclusively on the six segments of a square: two horizontal lines, two vertical lines and two diagonals.

Encoding a character consists of reproducing the corresponding pattern in the reference square alphabet:

A		B		C		D		E		F
G		H		I		J		K		L
M		N		O		P		Q		R
S		T		U		V		W		X
Y		Z		0		1		2		3
4		5		6		7		8		9
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Decoding a Quadoo character consists of identifying the segments present in the square, then finding the corresponding character in the reference table.

Reading can be facilitated by the strong resemblance of the characters to Latin script, which is one of the design principles of Quadoo.

Handwriting in Quadoo can use a board with square holes. The template then guides the drawing of the horizontal, vertical and diagonal segments that make up each character.

Quadoo characters are constructed solely from the four sides and the two diagonals of a square: the segments are therefore horizontal, vertical or diagonal. Each character uses between one and six lines.

The glyphs were designed based on Latin script to facilitate visual recognition. Quadoo can therefore evoke certain Latin letters while simplifying them into geometric segments.

The four corners of the square can be numbered as follows: 1 at the top left, 2 at the top right, 3 at the bottom left and 4 at the bottom right. Thus, A corresponds to the pattern 3-2-4, while B corresponds to the pattern 1-2-4-3-2.

dCode used the Quadoo fonts by Alexander Fakoó under a Creative Commons License (No-Derivatives, Non-Commercial, Attribution) from the inventor's website here