[Blindmath] UEB again (was Braille code urgency)

[Michael Whapples]

Hello,
I do wonder that as well, I slightly question the need for stacks of paper Braille which gets shipped about and that may be electronic transfer of documents with local translation may be better. Another side affect of that would be that size/bulk of Braille is not such an issue, if I need chapter x from book Y, I can have just chapter X rather than the whole of book Y. The only size issue would be on the impact on reading speed (eg. how fast I can read a Braille cell and whether by making it more compact I may be slowed if it were too complicated and needed to spend time working out the meaning).

Some questions though relating to implementing the different Braille codes in liblouis. Was it harder to do BAUK and Marburg because of the actual code? Was the difficulty possibly that you may be more familiar with Nemeth? Would extra help from experts in the other Braille codes have helped you and made it easier? Finally from what I know you implemented the Nemeth support first, could it have been that as you did Nemeth first you possibly did things in liblouis which slightly favoured Nemeth and so when adding a different code you had to work with something which may have been slightly suboptimal for the other codes?

Michael Whapples
On 4 Dec 2011, at 23:49, John J. Boyer wrote:

> Since software like liblouis and BrailleBlaster can produce braille in a 
> variety of math codes from a given source document, we don't have to be 
> tied to whatever BANA or other braillel authorities decide. If a 
> particular person wants Nemeth, she can have it. If the next person 
> wants BAUK  or Marburg,, she can have that. 
> 
> As the one who is developing this software I can say that Nemeth was 
> easy to implement. BAUK math and Marburg were lmuch more difficult, and 
> the result isn't aquite satisfactory. Nemeth is very good. 
> 
> 
> John
> 
> On Sun, Dec 04, 2011 at 08:41:50AM -1000, Susan Jolly wrote:
>> Steve, I agree Braille has to modernize and take into account changes in print.  Luckily there has been very little change to the typeset representation of print which is well-reflected in how Nemeth represents math expressions.  So as far as math is concerned, Nemeth is clearly more print-like than UEB.
>> 
>> Sina, when I first learned of the use of letters as numbers in UEB I researched the historical development of how digits are represented.  It seemed pretty clear that advances in mathematics occurred when numbers were given unique representations.  I no longer have my notes on that research but it seems plausible that there is a relationship between understanding and representation.
>> 
>> UKAAF, which has just adopted UEB, quotes an average increase of 21% in the length of math expressions over BAUK.  They don't say how they determined this.
>> 
>> SusanJ
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> -- 
> John J. Boyer; President, Chief Software Developer
> Abilitiessoft, Inc.
> http://www.abilitiessoft.com
> Madison, Wisconsin USA
> Developing software for people with disabilities
> 
> 
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