On Thu, 1 Sep 2011, Paul Erkens wrote:
So, given the 4-byte representation of characters in utf8 unicode, a
braille table could easily be made up based on that character set. This
would of course imply that some braille dot patterns would occur more
than once in unicode, because an accented letter in Polish, looks the
same in braille as a c cedille in French. They are 2 distinct characters
for the sighted, but one and the same symbol in braille.
Yes.
Why is it, that we don't yet have a unified unicode utf8 braille table?
Any idea?
Because it would be like herding cats.
The International Council on English Braille (ICEB) consists of 7
countries - Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Nigeria, South Africa, The
United Kingdom and The United States. Back in (I think) 1992, the Braille
Authority of North America (BANA) began looking at the problem of a
unified Braille code. This code would unify separate codes used for
literary Braille, mathematics, science and computer usage.
After many thousands of hours of work, countless meetings, lots of
politicing and a fair amount of naval-gazing on the subject of the best
way to represent things in Braille, the Unified English Braille Code
(UEBC), also known as Unified English Braille (UEB), was eventually
adopted as an official English Braille code by ICEB in 2004. This means
that it took 12 years for only 7 countries, all speaking English, to agree
on a unified code, a code that none of these countries were obligated to
adopt as their official code.
7 years further on, and I admit to being a bit out of tuch, I think 5
countries have officially adopted it. One of the remaining two is
reportedly thinking about it, and The United States is apparently not at
all interested, even though the effort to create the code began there.
My point with all this is that it took 7 countries speaking the same
language 12 years to develop a standard they could all live with, and 7
years later they've not all adopted it yet. Considering the infinitely
more difficult task of getting a single Braille code for all known
languages that everyone would be happy with, and I fear this would be
simply impossible to do.
Of course, I'd ove to be wrong. But to use your example, which of the two
countries would be prepared to give up the symbol they're used to?
Geoff.
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