Video
Unified English Braille: Perspectives from Braille Users
In this webcast, Kim Charlson and Joanne Becker discuss the roll out of the Unified English Braille (UEB) and the challenges in making this transition.
In this webcast, Kim Charlson and Joanne Becker discuss the roll out of the Unified English Braille (UEB) Code which occurred on January 4th in conjunction with Louis Braille’s birthday. Kim and Joanne talk about the challenges in making this transition along with the benefits. In particular, they address the issue of the advancements in technology and the necessity of UEB in meeting the technology needs.
Presented by Kim Charlson and Joanne Becker
Length of time to complete: approximately 30 minutes
- Introduction
- Overcoming the Resistance to Adopting UEB
- Common Issues That UEB Will Address
- UEB and Accessible Technology
- Rolling out UEB in the US
NARRATOR: On November 2, 2012, the United States members of the Braille Authority of North America, BANA, voted to adopt Unified English Braille, UEB, to replace English Braille American Edition in the United States. Based on extensive dialogue and planning that involved more than 30 organizations as well as individual consumers, teachers, and transcribers, BANA established January 4, 2016 as the date by which the United States will implement UEB.
KIM CHARLSON: So this isn’t the first time in the history of braille that unification was ever talked about.
It’s been an issue in the late 1800s up through the 1930s where braille was initially unified at that point.
That was such a controversial era that it was called the War of the Dots, because there were so many contractions and so many different ways people wanted to do things with those dots.
NARRATOR: We will see examples of two tactile alphabets, each of which had proponents and detractors. The first is braille. And we see the first four letters of the alphabet, A through D, as they are represented in their six dot braille configurations.
The next is upper and lowercase letters, A through D, in New York Point. A New York Point cell was a four over four dot horizontal configuration. All capital letters were four dots wide.
CHARLSON: That there was no unity in the code, and it was just a complex — everybody had their own ideas. So since that time, there were changes, some fairly major changes made in the 1950s around braille, adding more contractions or short-form words to shorten the braille.
And then in the 1970s, we had nemeth code for mathematics and science. And there’s been many, many additions, changes. Computer braille is also another good example of a code that, of course, Louis Braille did not invent computer braille, because he wasn’t around at that point. And he didn’t know how to write email addresses. So symbols like at signs and things like that weren’t part of the code.
JOANNE BECKER: UEB stands for Unified English Braille. So for the first time, English speaking countries around the world are all going to have the same braille code. And that’s significant, because blind people are going to have access to many more materials.
It’s going to be easier to use technology and to be able to translate from print to braille and to translate from braille to print. And this code is going to simplify that procedure tremendously. Print has changed dramatically over the years. So print documents, the layout has become far more complex. And how do you translate that information to a blind person?
Transcribers have this really difficult task of trying to represent exactly what’s on a printed page for a blind reader. And one of the things that has occurred is things such as italicized text and bold. All of these various symbols that are used in print, we need to have a way to exactly replicate that for blind people.
NARRATOR: We see an example of how UEB would designate the italicized word, are, in the sentence, these are the files we need. Underneath the printed sentence, we see a two dimensional UEB braille translation in which a symbol before the word are indicates the use of italics. The two-celled symbol consists of dots four and six and dock two.
BECKER: And the fact that people have had to use three different codes. When students are working in math, nemeth code is used. They also need to learn computer braille. So literary braille, nemeth, and computer braille, those are complicated things for one student to have to learn.
CHARLSON: So as countries created their own symbols, we started to get more chaos and more confusion. And really the history of the Unified English Braille movement started in 1990 when two key leaders in the braille community, Tim Cranmer and Abraham Nemeth approached BANA, BANA being the Braille Authority of North America, to ask about the potential of unifying the English braille code, and that they felt it was very important for, as we often say, the computability of braille. And that was one of the factors, the computability of braille being the engagement and evolution of technology into the braille code.
CHAPTER 2: Overcoming the Resistance to Adopting UEB
CHARLSON: It has been a challenge. I think the benefits, in my view, are immense with respect to Unified English Braille, those being that you have a shared literacy tool, braille, Unified English Braille, UEB as we often call it. And you have the ability to share those resources.
The symbols are the same. So someone can borrow a book in Australia from the US or from England, and they’re going to be very successful at reading that book.
But I think even a bigger rationale for Unified English Braille is related to the technology and the forward and back translation that we’ve talked about before. And the forward and back translation allows for a braille device to print. So that a student in school could write the answers to their test, and then they could print those answers out for their sighted classroom teacher. Or a sighted transcriber can create a file that can be embossed or sent to a note taker from a print document into braille.
NARRATOR: We see a young girl who is blind using her refreshable brailler that has been paired with an iPad. Using braille cords and the cursor button on her brailler, she is able to access the iPad’s voiceover feature to navigate to and access an app called Exploding Braille.
Similarly, the brailler can be paired to a computer, and the user could type and print a document.
TEACHER: Awesome. You got it.
BECKER: I think people’s fear is that it’s going to be really difficult to make the transition. And of course, there are going to be some changes. We’re losing nine contractions. And we’re actually gaining some new symbols. So we’ll be able to tell if something has bullets. Or various things such as italicized or underlined material will be easy for us to distinguish.
And I think one of the things that — my hope is that people will be more positive about understanding the overall benefit. And while there will be a learning curve, I don’t think it’s going to be as substantial as people fear. In New Zealand, for example, when they switched to UEB — I believe it was in 2004 — they found that it wasn’t as difficult as all the people imagined it would be.
CHARLSON: I’ve heard similar recounts of similar stories. From Canada, they just announced that many of their students in Canada have already made the transition. And they were expecting to take two years to do that, and it has already happened for them.
I think that we say that it’s a new code, and it is, the Unified English Braille. And it is a new code. But you’re not starting from scratch. If you have any knowledge of braille, you’re a current braille reader, braille transcriber, or teacher, you’re certainly not going to throw out everything you ever knew and have to learn new symbols.
CHAPTER 3: Common Issues That UEB Will Address
CHARLSON: It’s amazing to me how many punctuation marks there are out there. And a lot of them, most braille readers will never need to see. How often do see curly braces and things like that? But you see those things, and they all have their place, and when you need them, you need them.
But probably the two that really amaze me that when it came to computability, was the opening and the closing parentheses. That in braille, those symbols were identical in braille. They were dots two, three, five, six in braille. And you use the same symbol for opening and closing.
So if it’s the same symbol, how do you know which one to use, how does the computer know which one to use when a braille reader is trying to send a document back to a printer for their teacher? Because the computer can’t tell, is this an opening parentheses or a closing parentheses? And so you get the wrong ones, and then the teacher would mark you off, and it wasn’t your fault as a braille student.
And the quotation marks, there were challenges around the quotation marks that they would get mixed up. So it’s really, I think, incredibly helpful for the technology and the devices to make it possible for the students of today to be able to communicate in the mainstream classroom with their teachers and with their classmates and have a way to do that accurately and effectively.
NARRATOR: To demonstrate how UEB would designate parentheses around the word braille, we see the two-celled celled UEB symbol for opening parentheses, dot five and dots one, two, and six, followed by the contracted braille spelling of the word braille, letters B, R, L, and the closing parentheses, dot five and dots three, four, and five.
CHARLSON: There’s a lot of areas in the literary code where we didn’t have symbols in literary that we did have in the mathematics code, but you couldn’t cross them over. They wouldn’t make sense to people. So for example, you see it all the time in magazine articles and newspapers. They’ll say this plus that equals something.
And they’re writing it. It’s not a math equation. It’s words. But in literary braille, there was no plus symbol or equals symbol. So we often would borrow those symbols from nemeth, but then that really wasn’t quite the right fit for them. The translator didn’t know that.
So now in Unified English Braille, we have a plus and a minus and a times and division symbols, and equals, that can be used in the literary context or in a mathematics context. And you’ll know what those symbols are. You know what they mean.
They’re not something else — if they’re over here, they mean this, and when they’re over here, they mean that. So it’s so much clearer. It gives braille more accuracy instead of spelling out the words, which basically is what braille has done up to this point. If there was an equals sign in a sentence, the word equals was spelled out.
And for years, I had no idea that people were using the equals symbol when they would write things. And I would just write equals and spell it out. And then I found out that no, most of the time, people are putting a equal sign. But braille readers, they see plus. They see minus. They see equals. They didn’t know that.
BECKER: I have to tell you, I didn’t know that until this moment.
CHARLSON: Oh my gosh.
BECKER: I’m one of those people that did not know that.
CHARLSON: Because it wasn’t reflecting what’s in print. And a lot of people say, well braille’s doing just fine. Why do we need to reflect what’s in print?
Well I think if you’re a student or a professional working in the sighted world, you have to reflect print the way your colleagues are reflecting print. And you have to write it the same way and know what’s going on and know about fonts and know about typefaces and emphasis indicators like italics and bold and underline and things like that.
But if it’s a textbook, and you have the student that needs to know, they’ll get two extra points if they define the underlined word in their vocabulary book. How are we going to tell those students which words are underlined? There has to be some kind of symbol or indicator that will do that.
NARRATOR: We see the text word, braille, underlined. The two-celled UEB designation for the underlined word, braille, is shown, dots four, five, and six, and dot five, followed by the braille letters, B, R, L.
CHARLSON: So it’s very important. When you need it, you need those font indicators and those emphasis indicators like underlining and italics to help you identify whether something important about that word, I need to have to focus on that.
CHAPTER 4: UEB and Accessible Technology
BECKER: Well it’s interesting that already, Duxbury translation software has UEB. And any braille device, it would be possible for anyone to begin reading UEB today, if that’s what they decided to do. And I should, come to think of it. So it’s not going to be difficult to access UEB with braille displays.
CHARLSON: I think there are several ways to go about implementing the change in the braille code. And one of those is through the technologies. We’ve talked about how you can set the technologies so that you can read in UEB. Note takers, braille displays have many choices.
Right now you could have British braille. You can have American braille. You can have Australian braille. You can have Unified English Braille, which is definitely why we were hoping to be able to unify this. Because there’s so many choices. The technology can establish that through the base code. So it’s very doable with respect to the technology.
CHAPTER 5: Rolling out UEB in the US
CHARLSON: There’s a whole strategy for training and introducing the Unified English Braille to existing, current braille readers. I’ve been involved with making a document called the UEB reader, available for braille readers. And so I feel like I’m hearing from all the braille readers, because I’m getting hundreds of emails all the time now from people asking to have a copy of the UEB reader.
So there’s been a lot of interest. There’s a lot of curiosity about it. There’s quite a bit of speculation. I don’t know what it’s going to be, but I want to see this.
BECKER: I even think for transcribers and teachers of the visually impaired, this is really going to simplify their learning curve. Because the rules are actually, I think, in many ways, so complex that perhaps it does frighten some of the TVIs from actually experiencing the excitement about learning braille and learning the rules. I think as teachers become more comfortable with this, my hope is that they will really produce some excitement and get the students on board with the importance of making this transition.
CHARLSON: I think that Unified English Braille and UEB and our adoption of UEB beginning January 4, 2016 is our implementation date, and that’s a strategic date as well. Because that’s the birth date of Louis Braille. Instead of January 1, I’ve had a lot of people say, well, why did they pick the fourth? Well the fourth was Louis’s birthday, and this has to tie back to that.
NARRATOR: We see a painted portrait of Louis Braille, the developer of the raised dot braille alphabet.
CHARLSON: I think that there’s no question that there has been, and continues to be, a braille literacy crisis throughout the world, particularly in developed countries. And we have seen over the years that the literacy rate of blind individuals has declined significantly who use braille.
And if we want, and I truly want, to see braille continue to be the valuable and useful tool that it is for people who are blind, we must make a change to make it easier for children to learn braille and for adults to learn braille. It can’t continue to be a process that takes an adult who is newly blind two years to learn how to read braille. My absolute strong belief is that this is truly going to be a good thing for braille readers, although a lot of people don’t feel that way right now.
I think that that is going to strengthen braille and make it easier to produce more braille, which makes me very happy that we can have more braille and share it more easily. And that we’ve had to do something to strengthen braille, so that it could live into the future.
BECKER: This will be the first time that all English-speaking countries around the world will be able to share braille. And that, I think, is really significant.
NARRATOR: Further resources and information can be found at the website of the Braille Authority of North America, BANA, at brailleauthority.org. For Unified English Braille, UEB reader, produced by BANA, contact Kim Charleson at 617-972-7248 or [email protected].
Frequently used UEB symbols produced by the National Library Services for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, NLS, are available from your state’s cooperating NLS library, or you can contact Kim Charlson.
