WAZU JAPAN's Gallery of Unicode Fonts

Visible Speech is not part of the Unicode Standard. This page tests the Unicode Private Use Area defined for Visible Speech writing system (U+E780 - U+E7FF) by the ConScript Unicode Registry (last revised 1997-01-21, current as of 2006-01-31).

It is part of the Gallery of Unicode Fonts and is based on the following sources:

• The ConScript Unicode Registry
• Peter T. Daniels & William Bright's The World's Writing Systems
• Omniglot's Visible Speech page
• Mark Shoulson's Visible Speech pages

Visible Speech is a writing system developed by Alexander Melville Bell in 1867. This phonetic alphabet was used in America in the 1800s to help deaf children learn spoken language. The components of the symbols convey information about the sound to be produced. Because of that, Visible Speech is categorized as an "iconic notation".

In 1880 Henry Sweet, a former pupil of Bell's, published an updated version called the "Revised Organic Alphabet". His changes were based in part on years of practical use of Bell's original system. In Britain, Sweet's version became preferred. Sweet was a supporter of the FTA (Dhi Fonètik Tîcerz' Asóciécon) which evolved into the International Phonetic Association.

The ConScript Unicode Registry definition covers only the majority of symbols for Bell's original Visible Speech, not the Revised Organic Alphabet

Work is being done on an official proposal for adding all of the characters needed for both Visible Speech and the Revised Organic Alphabet to Unicode Plane 1.

pick the desired font name

The selected font must be installed on your system. This page might not display properly with older versions of Internet Explorer or Netscape. Additionally, Netscape & Firefox may show an unsupported character using a different font to the one selected. Internet Explorer seems to do this too, but to a much lesser extent.

Reserved/unallocated codepoints are shown with a gray background.

There are two sections presented below to test characters in the Visible Speech block:

• The first section shows the characters in functional groupings.
   
• The second section is just the list of Visible Speech codepoints laid out in a grid format.
  • Placing your cursor over any of the characters in the chart shows the codepoint and its name from the Unicode Character Database (Copyright © 1991-2006 Unicode, Inc). This may not work with some browsers.

Visible Speech / CSUR Private Use Area

Visible Speech / CSUR Private Use Area [E780-E7FF]