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Unified English Braille
Unified English Braille Code (UEBC, formerly UBC, now usually simply UEB) is an English language Braille code standard, developed to encompass the wide variety of literary and technical material in use in the English-speaking world today, in uniform fashion.
Standard 6-dot braille only provides 63 distinct characters (not including the space character), and thus, over the years a number of distinct rule-sets have been developed to represent literary text, mathematics, scientific material, computer software, the @ symbol used in email addresses, and other varieties of written material. Different countries also used differing encodings at various times: during the 1800s American Braille competed with English Braille and New York Point in the War of the Dots. As a result of the expanding need to represent technical symbolism, and divergence during the past 100 years across countries, braille users who desired to read or write a large range of material have needed to learn different sets of rules, depending on what kind of material they were reading at a given time. Rules for a particular type of material were often not compatible from one system to the next (the rule-sets for literary/mathematical/computerized encoding-areas were sometimes conflicting—and of course differing approaches to encoding mathematics were not compatible with each other), so the reader would need to be notified as the text in a book moved from computer braille code for programming to Nemeth Code for mathematics to standard literary braille. Moreover, the braille rule-set used for math and computer science topics, and even to an extent braille for literary purposes, differed among various English-speaking countries.
Unified English Braille is intended to develop one set of rules, the same everywhere in the world, which could be applied across various types of English-language material. The notable exception to this unification is Music Braille, which UEB specifically does not encompass, because it is already well-standardized internationally. Unified English Braille is designed to be readily understood by people familiar with the literary braille (used in standard prose writing), while also including support for specialized math and science symbols, computer-related symbols (the @ sign as well as more specialised programming-language syntax), foreign alphabets, and visual effects (bullets, bold type, accent marks, and so on).
According to the original 1991 specification for UEB, the goals were:
Some goals were specially and explicitly called out as key objectives, not all of which are mentioned above:
Goals that were specifically not part of the UEB upgrade process were the ability to handle languages outside the Roman alphabet (cf. the various national variants of ASCII in the ISO 8859 series versus the modern pan-universal Unicode standard, which governs how writing systems are encoded for computerized use).
Work on UEB formally began in 1991, and preliminary draft standard was published in March 1995 (as UBC), then upgraded several times thereafter. Unified English Braille (UEB) was originally known as Unified Braille Code (UBC), with the English-specific nature being implied, but later[when?] the word "English" was formally incorporated into its name—Unified English Braille Code (UEBC)—and still more recently[when?] it has come to be called Unified English Braille (UEB). On April 2, 2004, the International Council on English Braille (ICEB) gave the go-ahead for the unification of various English braille codes. This decision was reached following 13 years of analysis, research, and debate. ICEB said that Unified English Braille was sufficiently complete for recognition as an international standard for English braille, which the seven ICEB member-countries could consider for adoption as their national code. South Africa adopted the UEB almost immediately (in May 2004). During the following year, the standard was adopted by Nigeria (February 5, 2005), Australia (May 14, 2005), and New Zealand (November 2005). On April 24, 2010, the Canadian Braille Authority (CBA) voted to adopt UEB, making Canada the fifth nation to adopt UEB officially. On October 21, 2011, the UK Association for Accessible Formats voted to adopt UEB as the preferred[clarification needed] code in the UK. On November 2, 2012, the Braille Authority of North America (BANA) became the sixth of the seven member-countries of the ICEB to officially adopt the UEB.
The major criticism against UEB is that it fails to handle mathematics or computer science as compactly as codes designed to be optimal for those disciplines. Besides requiring more space to represent and more time to read and write, the verbosity of UEB can make learning mathematics more difficult. Nemeth Braille, officially used in the United States since 1952, and as of 2002 the de facto standard for teaching and doing mathematics in braille in the US, was specifically invented to correct the cumbersomeness of doing mathematics in braille. However, although the Nemeth encoding standard was officially adopted by the JUTC of the US and the UK in the 1950s, in practice only the USA switched their mathematical braille to the Nemeth system, whereas the UK continued to use the traditional Henry Martyn Taylor coding (not to be confused with Hudson Taylor, who was involved with the use of Moon type for the blind in China during the 1800s) for their braille mathematics. Programmers in the United States who write their programming codefiles in braille—as opposed to in ASCII text with use of a screenreader for example—tend to use Nemeth-syntax numerals, whereas programmers in the UK use yet another system (not Taylor-numerals and not literary-numerals).
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Unified English Braille AI simulator
(@Unified English Braille_simulator)
Unified English Braille
Unified English Braille Code (UEBC, formerly UBC, now usually simply UEB) is an English language Braille code standard, developed to encompass the wide variety of literary and technical material in use in the English-speaking world today, in uniform fashion.
Standard 6-dot braille only provides 63 distinct characters (not including the space character), and thus, over the years a number of distinct rule-sets have been developed to represent literary text, mathematics, scientific material, computer software, the @ symbol used in email addresses, and other varieties of written material. Different countries also used differing encodings at various times: during the 1800s American Braille competed with English Braille and New York Point in the War of the Dots. As a result of the expanding need to represent technical symbolism, and divergence during the past 100 years across countries, braille users who desired to read or write a large range of material have needed to learn different sets of rules, depending on what kind of material they were reading at a given time. Rules for a particular type of material were often not compatible from one system to the next (the rule-sets for literary/mathematical/computerized encoding-areas were sometimes conflicting—and of course differing approaches to encoding mathematics were not compatible with each other), so the reader would need to be notified as the text in a book moved from computer braille code for programming to Nemeth Code for mathematics to standard literary braille. Moreover, the braille rule-set used for math and computer science topics, and even to an extent braille for literary purposes, differed among various English-speaking countries.
Unified English Braille is intended to develop one set of rules, the same everywhere in the world, which could be applied across various types of English-language material. The notable exception to this unification is Music Braille, which UEB specifically does not encompass, because it is already well-standardized internationally. Unified English Braille is designed to be readily understood by people familiar with the literary braille (used in standard prose writing), while also including support for specialized math and science symbols, computer-related symbols (the @ sign as well as more specialised programming-language syntax), foreign alphabets, and visual effects (bullets, bold type, accent marks, and so on).
According to the original 1991 specification for UEB, the goals were:
Some goals were specially and explicitly called out as key objectives, not all of which are mentioned above:
Goals that were specifically not part of the UEB upgrade process were the ability to handle languages outside the Roman alphabet (cf. the various national variants of ASCII in the ISO 8859 series versus the modern pan-universal Unicode standard, which governs how writing systems are encoded for computerized use).
Work on UEB formally began in 1991, and preliminary draft standard was published in March 1995 (as UBC), then upgraded several times thereafter. Unified English Braille (UEB) was originally known as Unified Braille Code (UBC), with the English-specific nature being implied, but later[when?] the word "English" was formally incorporated into its name—Unified English Braille Code (UEBC)—and still more recently[when?] it has come to be called Unified English Braille (UEB). On April 2, 2004, the International Council on English Braille (ICEB) gave the go-ahead for the unification of various English braille codes. This decision was reached following 13 years of analysis, research, and debate. ICEB said that Unified English Braille was sufficiently complete for recognition as an international standard for English braille, which the seven ICEB member-countries could consider for adoption as their national code. South Africa adopted the UEB almost immediately (in May 2004). During the following year, the standard was adopted by Nigeria (February 5, 2005), Australia (May 14, 2005), and New Zealand (November 2005). On April 24, 2010, the Canadian Braille Authority (CBA) voted to adopt UEB, making Canada the fifth nation to adopt UEB officially. On October 21, 2011, the UK Association for Accessible Formats voted to adopt UEB as the preferred[clarification needed] code in the UK. On November 2, 2012, the Braille Authority of North America (BANA) became the sixth of the seven member-countries of the ICEB to officially adopt the UEB.
The major criticism against UEB is that it fails to handle mathematics or computer science as compactly as codes designed to be optimal for those disciplines. Besides requiring more space to represent and more time to read and write, the verbosity of UEB can make learning mathematics more difficult. Nemeth Braille, officially used in the United States since 1952, and as of 2002 the de facto standard for teaching and doing mathematics in braille in the US, was specifically invented to correct the cumbersomeness of doing mathematics in braille. However, although the Nemeth encoding standard was officially adopted by the JUTC of the US and the UK in the 1950s, in practice only the USA switched their mathematical braille to the Nemeth system, whereas the UK continued to use the traditional Henry Martyn Taylor coding (not to be confused with Hudson Taylor, who was involved with the use of Moon type for the blind in China during the 1800s) for their braille mathematics. Programmers in the United States who write their programming codefiles in braille—as opposed to in ASCII text with use of a screenreader for example—tend to use Nemeth-syntax numerals, whereas programmers in the UK use yet another system (not Taylor-numerals and not literary-numerals).