Unified English Braille: The Future of Braille in the United States

Abstract

The Braille Authority of North America (BANA) is the rule setting body that establishes the and guidelines for braille use in North America. On November 2, 2012, the Board of BANA voted to adopt Unified English Braille (UEB) in the United States. (Canada, part of BANA, had already voted to adopt UEB in 2011, because adoption is determined by country, not by braille authority.) UEB will replace the current literary braille code, English Braille American Edition. Nemeth Code for Mathematics and Science Notation, music braille, and the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) will continue to be recognized as official braille in the United States. To understand what led to the historic decision to adopt UEB, a bit of background information is necessary. How the unified code came to be The braille code as it has been used in the United States has changed numerous times in the approximately 90 years since its adoption. By the 1980s, several were commonly used: literary, Nemeth, music braille, and computer braille. Multiple meant that multiple symbols were used for the same symbol in print, such as the period, the dollar sign, and the comma. In 1991, two well-respected experts in the field of tactile communication presented a paper about the prolifer ation of braille codes to the BANA Board. Tim Cranmer, founder of the International Braille Research Center and inventor of the Cranmer Abacus, and Abraham Nemeth, creator of the Nemeth code and retired professor of mathematics, described the need for a unified code that would use the same symbols in braille in all contexts and would streamline braille to make it easier to read, write, and learn. A copy of this document is on the BANA website, . As a result of this letter from Drs. Cranmer and Nemeth, BANA established a committee to examine the possibilities of developing a unified code. Shortly thereafter, other English speaking countries were invited to participate in the project through the International Council on English Braille (ICEB). Throughout the 1990s and into the early 2000s, this international community, consisting primarily of braille readers, worked diligently through an open process to develop a code first referred to as Unified Braille Code (UBC), then UEB. In 2004, UEB was considered substantially complete for individual countries to begin the process of voting on the adoption of UEB. For the past eight years, BANA has been monitoring the implementation of UEB as it has been adopted in ICEB countries: first South Africa, then Australia, New Zealand, Nigeria, Canada, and the United Kingdom. DESCRIPTION OF UEB'S TECHNICAL DETAILS UEB is based on the current literary braille code, the code most widely used in English speaking countries, and it was designed to be as clear and consistent as possible to allow for ease of reading and transcribing. UEB is designed to be more computable than the current code; that is, it is easier to use transcription software to create accurate braille from electronic print files using UEB, and it has more flexible rules and fewer exceptions to those rules. It is also possible to back-translate UEB, meaning that individuals who use electronic devices to read and create electronic braille can turn electronic UEB files into print more easily for people who don't read braille. Out of the 189 contractions in literary braille, nine have been deleted to allow for greater consistency and less ambiguity: ally, ation, ble, by, com, dd, into, o'clock, and to. …