[Blindmath] Unified?

[Susan Jolly]

The previous poster pointed out that "unified" has two meanings.

First for those who don't know, the Nemeth code is a complete code with rules for text, math, and formatting.  Math and other technical books are transcribed here in the US following the Nemeth code in its entirety.  However there is a growing use of just the math rules of Nemeth in conjunction with text in other languages such as Hindi.  In fact, Nemeth math is likely the most widely-used math code in the world as it is used not only in the US and India but in a number of East Asian countries including Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam.

As far as unifying English Braille for English-speaking countries that seems hard as English print is not unified.  US and UK spelling are different as are the measuring systems and even the meanings of words such as "flat." There are typically separate UK and US versions of printed books. In any case if we just consider braille readers who speak English as a first language, there are more in the US than in New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Nigeria, Canada, and the UK combined. So from a practical sense it would seem that if unifying in the second sense were to have been a genuine motive, these other countries would have stuck with or changed to what the US does.

SusanJ