[Blindmath] BANA still considering abolishing the Nemeth braille code

Wed Sep 14 20:59:46 UTC 2011

I hope Susan J. can hear Susan M. applauding all the way from the mountains
of western NC.  Thank you, thank you, thank you!  I have been a fan of yours
for several years. :)

SM

On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 4:41 PM, Susan Jolly <easjolly at ix.netcom.com> wrote:

> 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/bm02/bm0201/bm020117.htm>
> http://nfb.org/legacy/bm/bm98/**bm980214.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
>
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-- 
Experience is a brutal teacher, but you learn. My God, do you learn. --CS
Lewis