Description of Unified English Braille Implementation in Canada

Abstract

Unified English Braille (UEB) is used for the transcription of literary and technical texts in Canada. Professionals in Canada have been closely involved in the process of developing and adopting UEB for many years. In 2004, the Canadian Braille Authority (CBA) voted to explore potential implications of adopting UEB. The CBA teaching and learning committee received funding from Human Resources and Skills Development, Canada, for research that examined the use of UEB by braille-reading technical experts. Carried out by members of the CBA teaching and learning committee, the research was not intended to be a comparison of use of UEB and the Nemeth Braille Code for Mathematics and Science Notation, but, rather, it was an attempt to determine if UEB was a useful code for representing mathematics, science, and computer science. The researchers asked the technical experts to explore samples in UEB and to discuss their findings in a focus-group setting, and the results were published in the Journal of Visual Impairment & Blindness (Holbrook & MacCuspie, 2010). Stakeholders considered these findings, along with the results of consultations conducted across Canada, to make the decision about the adoption of UEB for use in literary and technical texts. In 2010, CBA--now known as Braille Literacy Canada (BLC)--voted to adopt UEB for literary and technical texts in Canada. In 2012, British Columbia hosted a three-day UEB Summit with 32 Canadian delegates for the purpose of discussing UEB implementation in Canada. EVALUATION OF UEB In Canada, education is a provincial matter, and braille production is overseen by the Canadian Association of Educational Resource Centres for Alternate Format Materials (CAER), which has representatives from all the major educational braille producers across Canada that produce materials for students in kindergarten through Grade 12, as well as those in postsecondary educational environments. For a few years prior to the official adoption of UEB in Canada, CAER explored how UEB might simplify teaching and learning of mathematics and better integrate technology that would make it easier to translate print materials into braille (forward translation) and braille materials into print (back translation). In early 2013, CAER created a subcommittee to develop a national implementation plan for the transition to UEB in education. The outcome was an agreement that all CAER members should move forward together with the transition to UEB in order to ensure that resource centers could continue to share resources with each other, thus saving time and money and allowing students to easily move from province to province. It was agreed that each province would develop its own plan based on local needs and resources, but that the overarching transition for all provinces would be mostly completed by September 2017. CAER members communicated this plan through a panel presentation at the Seeing Beyond the Horizon Conference in Halifax in May 2014. DEVELOPMENT OF A GRADED APPROACH FOR TRANSITION The Provincial Resource Centre for the Visually Impaired (PRCVI) in British Columbia, under the management of the first author of this commentary, Christopher Marshall, decided to take a graded approach to the introduction of UEB. It considered factors such as the number of students currently learning braille, available human and monetary resources, and the training requirements of teachers of students with visual impairments and transcribers. The plan for British Columbia spans five years: it began in 2013 with the development of resources for the first cohort of students in kindergarten through grade 3. In the first year, year PRCVI disseminated information to school district administrators, conducted a series of face-to-face and online training sessions in UEB, and transcribers and teachers of students with visual impairments were encouraged to update their own braille qualifications. …