Hi Jeff, I would have no problem giving up symbols I know now, if you can be sure that finally, the same symbol holds throughout the whole world. So, to summarize, it's not the technical issues hlding us back, but people not willing to have something changed in favor of the international community. But if that is true, why not have one big unicode braille table containing all symbols from all languages nonetheless, if it is still possible for someone to stick to what they are used to with their own legacy braille table? Thinking about it, maybe this is already true, because we still have our Dutch, German, U.S. etc tables, while there is actually already a beginning of the unicode table. Interesting stuff. Luckily we have complementary speech synthesis to braille. Thanks Jeff for clearing this up.
Paul. On Sep 2, 2011, at 10:57 PM, Geoff Shang wrote: > 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. > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "MacVisionaries" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected]. > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en.
