Halant

A diacritical mark used in Indian (Indic) scripts to suppress the inherent vowel of a consonant, enabling the formation of consonant clusters or conjuncts. When a halant follows a consonant, it indicates that the consonant should combine with the following consonant rather than being pronounced with its default vowel sound. The visual representation of a conjunct formed through halant may look entirely different from its component characters, creating significant challenges for Braille translation and screen reader technology because the system must understand these contextual transformations to correctly transliterate between visual and Braille representations or to provide accurate audio feedback.