Nope, I actually do refer to fonts as you know them. Long story short, prior to linux kernel 4.19 and brltty 6.0, only those characters that are mapped to a glyph in the currently loaded console font can be backtranslated to the actual codepoint. So to be able to read unicode braille (0x2800-0x28FF) I needed to load a braille font in addition to the standard latin glyph.
This dependency on the loaded font has been removed with linux 4.19 and brltty 6.0. Now, there is a new device (/dev/vcsu) which can be used to read the unicode codepoints of characters on the console, without having to go through the loaded font.