[Blindmath] BANA still considering abolishing the Nemeth braille code

[Susan Jolly]

Thank you Steve for the additional information.

In case this email is also reposted elsewhere, I will start with some of my 
credentials.  I apologize to those of you who are already familiar with my 
background but I feel that it is important to make it extremely clear why my 
opinions deserve consideration and respect and also to make it extremely 
clear that I would benefit neither professionally nor financially from any 
decisions BANA makes. Those of you who aren't interested please free to skip 
down to the row of asterisks.

I just turned 71 years old and have been retired from paid work for quite 
some time. I earned an A.B. in chemistry from Oberlin, an M.A.T. in 
chemistry education from Johns Hopkins, and a Ph.D. in theoretical chemistry 
from U. C. Irvine.  My first, pre-Ph.D., career was as a high school 
chemistry teacher but, although I loved teaching, I did not have the 
patience to deal with the public school bureaucracy which was bad even many 
years ago. After obtaining my Ph.D. I had a sucessful career as a 
computational scientist working at a National Lab on several different 
science-based programming teams where I developed and implemented numerical 
algorithms, helped with code maintenance and extensions, and worked directly 
with numerous in-house users. Just in case it isn't obvious, the point of 
this brief vita is to make it clear that I have a very strong background in 
both mathematics and computer software.

I am sighted and became interested in braille by happenstance after I 
retired because braille had long been an interest of my father's.  My 
father, an emeritus professor of chemical engineering, was active as a 
volunteer in the braille field in the early 1970's and attended numerous 
meetings including at least one NFB meeting.  He developed hardware 
prototypes related to tactile graphics and hard-copy reproduction and wrote 
a print-to-braille translator in Snobol. I have many of the newsletters and 
other artifacts that he collected during that period.

Since April 2001 I have spent many more than the 10,000 hours supposedly 
required to achieve mastery in a field. I've learned about the history of 
braille and the history of automated braille production, learned EBAE and 
Nemeth, carefully studied the technical details of the UEBC proposal, 
written programs in Java and ANTLR to interconvert EBAE and print and to 
backtranslate from Nemeth to print, and developed and maintained my 
dotlessbraille.org website.  (I'm leaving out much more.)  I've kept up with 
the field of braille education by closely following several other lists in 
addition to Blindmath, by attending two conferences, and by a great deal of 
reading.

An accomplishment I'm especially proud of despite its ending in tragedy is 
that I was instrumental in getting Prof. Eitan Gurari of the Ohio State 
Department of Computer Science and Engineering interested in automating the 
conversion of technical material to Nemeth braille. In July 2003 he obtained 
NSF Award #0312487 to support this effort.  Dr. Gurari most unfortunately 
passed away unexpectedly two years ago and his work was lost.

The best thing about my volunteer effort has been the many friends and 
acquaintances I've made both here in the US and in at least eight other 
countries.  This group includes braille users and other persons who are part 
of the braille community including parents, TVIs, transcribers, software 
developers, and DSS officers.  I won't name names but I've visited at least 
four Blindmath members in their hometowns and have exchanged countless 
emails with many of you as well as with many others in the braille 
community. I am especially grateful for your generosity in answering my many 
questions! Thank you.

******

Now to some of the points in Steve's email.

First as to the history of the UEBC.  As best as I can tell, Tim Cranmer, 
who died in 2001, was indeed well-loved, well-respected, and unusually 
talented.  However, he was primarily self-taught and his doctorate was an 
honorary degree awarded by the University of Louisville where his friend, 
Dr. Emerson Foulke, a blind professor of psychology, taught.  Dr. Foulke, 
who died in 1997, was also part of the original UEBC committee and he was 
the one who was so adamantly committed to upper numbers, that is, to using 
the same braille cells for the decimal digits as are also used for certain 
Latin letters. You can read more about Cranmer and Foulke in these two 
articles posted on the NFB site.
http://nfb.org/legacy/bm/bm02/bm0201/bm020117.htm
http://nfb.org/legacy/bm/bm98/bm980214.htm

Happily, both Joe Sullivan, Duxbury CEO, and Dr. Abraham Nemeth, retired 
professor of mathematics, who were the other two members of the original 
committee, are still alive.

I read Part I of the BANA three-part article when it first came out.  I 
agree that there have been significant changes that the US braille community 
needs to consider.  First, the shift from teaching braille users in special 
schools to mainstreaming has obviously had a large impact on the amount and 
variety of materials that need to be transcribed to braille.  Second, the 
multiple changes to the formatting of print documents due to electronic 
publishing has created great difficulties in adhering to the principle that 
a braille transcription should reflect all aspects of the corresponding 
print edition.

I don't have any idea what changes to the braille rules, if any, would help 
address these and other problems.

I do, however, feel very strongly that it would be much more difficult to 
read and write mathematics if the same characters were to be used for the 
digits as for certain letters.

I'm also sure that the change BANA notes is continuing and that the pace of 
change is increasing. One other example is the growing use of online 
educational materials and e-books. These factors imply to me that the best 
solutions will require a new international effort that incorporates input 
from a variety of smart, talented, and knowledgeable people.

You might at first be surprised at the word "international."   However, when 
you stop to realize that formatting is much more of a problem for braille 
transcription than is translating, you can see that a big part of the 
problem is independent of a particular language.  Moreover digital standards 
such as MathML, SVG, and software algorithms are not tied to a particular 
natural language.

There are many software applications that successfully address problems that 
are much more difficult than automatically transcribing print to braille. It 
is my belief that the primary reason why braille textbook production is 
still so expensive has to do with the lack of resources, not to any unique 
difficulty of the problem. Consider, for one simple example, the success of 
predictive-text algorithms such as T9 which allow you to enter text using 
only nine keys where each key represents three or four letters.  The 
algorithm figures out which letter is intended. I would not have guess that 
this was possible.

Sincerely,

Susan Jolly
www.dotlessbraille.org