[il-talk] UEB & Contracting Braille

[Steve Jacobson]

Bob,

I hope you don't mind if an outsider responds to your note, and I don't know
what your comment would have been.  However, I question greatly the30%
figure that was given to you.  I am aware of cases where the UEB version of
a document that is fifty pages long was only a few lines longer.  For
example, the "passage indicators" in UEB that lets one mark an entire
passage as being in uppercase rather than using two dot 6's before each word
is an example of a situation where some of the extra space used by UEB can
be reclaimed.  There may be cases where a UEB document is 30% longer,
though, I'm not saying that it can never happen.  If the book is a hard-copy
book, they should be charging by the actual page count, though, not a flat
percentage.  If it is a "BRF" book, even a page count isn't necessarily a
fair way to charge.  

I believe that the path we are taking by adopting UEB but keeping Nemeth
Code for math is the best path among options that are not perfect.  I do not
see this path as having the promise that was originally held out for a
unified braille code when the discussion started some twenty-five years ago.
However, we need to consider that over the next while, we are going to see
more and more braille on displays rather than on paper, and print is
evolving such that we need ways to be more aware of the attributes of text
than we have needed in the past.  There will be growing pains, though.

Given that you are chair of the braille Literacy Committee and I have been
somewhat involved in trying to work out a path to follow regarding UEB and
math, I would be glad to try to address off-line any questions you might
have, and if I don't know an answer I will try to get one.  You will not
hear me say that our current path is a perfect one, though, I'll only say I
think it is the best path given a number of factors.

Best regards,

Steve Jacobson

-----Original Message-----
From: il-talk [mailto:il-talk-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Robert
Gardner via il-talk
Sent: Saturday, June 25, 2016 11:54 AM
To: 'NFB of Illinois Mailing List' <il-talk at nfbnet.org>
Cc: Robert Gardner <rgardner4 at gmail.com>
Subject: [il-talk] UEB & Contracting Braille

An interesting bit of info involving UEB, the new Unified English Braille
code that went into effect at the first of the year: 

 

I checked on buying a Braille book, a novel, for myself from a commercial
source. I wanted it in UEB, and it's not available in UEB from NLS, which
would have been free. I found out that the book I wanted to buy costs 30%
more than a standard Grade 2 version because a book in UEB will be
approximately 30% larger than a standard Grade 2 Braille book. 

 

I could make some editorial comments here, but I won't. 

 

Bob Gardner

Chair, Braille Literacy Committee

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