Talk:English Braille

Clarification needed
"Braille is frequently portrayed as a re-encoding of the English orthography used by sighted people. However, braille is a separate writing system, not a variant of the printed English alphabet." In what sense is it not a re-encoding of the Roman alphabet (to a binary code of six tactile bits)? In English it appears (I am sighted) to transcribe all the quirks of English orthography. Strictly speaking it is not a writing system, but an embossing system. I think they are trying to say that Braille letters do not resemble Roman letters. == Hugh7 (talk) 07:47, 27 September 2023 (UTC)


 * @Hugh7 I'm guessing (also sighted) that it's to do with reading words directly from their Braille forms rather than by mentally transliterating them into Latin letters—which, for example, a Braille reader who's been blind from birth won't have seen anyway. Perhaps also that if it were equivalent to the Latin alphabet, it wouldn't have a load of extra glyphs. Musiconeologist (talk) 02:09, 2 May 2024 (UTC)

To do

 * To do: Reviewed and summarized one source; now verified with NCLID chap's 1–6, 8, 10,* 12–17. Hope to finish later. — kwami (talk) 10:15, 22 July 2012 (UTC)

*Skipped 10.1c.

Primary table
Is there a website that publishes (freely) the primary tables for A= and =A, ... on their home page/first linked page, for English braille or grade2 braille? -DePiep (talk) 12:44, 27 July 2012 (UTC)


 * Omniglot. — kwami (talk) 13:55, 27 July 2012 (UTC)

Quality
This article is much better now! --CJ Withers (talk) 14:31, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

Using fast co-templates of Template:Braille_cell
The page has been edited to use faster co-templates to format the Braille data, with Template:Braille_box and Template:bc2 for text characters. Several users had noted, in late November 2013, how they could no longer save edits to the page due to the 60-second timeout with "wp:Wikimedia Foundation error" and timing tests revealed over 95% of reformat time (perhaps 65 seconds) had been spent in Template:Braille_cell. The new, faster templates are intended to support all options of {braille_cell}, but further expansion of those templates is still underway. Meanwhile, the page "English Braille" now reformats within 20 seconds and can be edited to make other format changes. -Wikid77 (talk) 14:48, 23 November 2013 (UTC)

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External links modified
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 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20100403215834/http://www.avh.asso.fr/rubrics/association/association.php?langue=eng& to http://www.avh.asso.fr/rubrics/association/association.php?langue=eng&
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Sample
Can someone with more knowledge than myself check out the sample section on this page? It seems incorrect to me, but maybe I just don't have the requisite background knowledge to understand it. If it is wrong, it should be corrected, if it is right, it could be helpful to explain why it doesn't match up 1-1 as one might expect. Calvinballing (talk) 17:11, 26 July 2019 (UTC)

Organizations

 * Association Valentin Haüy
 * Perkins School for the Blind
 * National Braille Press – offers a free Braille alphabet card
 * Accessible Media Center
 * National Braille Association, Inc.
 * Braille Institute of America

Libraries

 * The National Library for the Blind
 * Washington Talking Book & Braille Library – serving residents of the State of Washington, USA
 * Braille Institute: Online Public Access Catalog

Learning

 * Learn Braille on the Internet For Free
 * Braille Bug – an educational site for kids, from the American Foundation for the Blind
 * BRL: Braille Through Remote Learning
 * On-line Braille Course of University of São Paulo
 * Online Braille Generator
 * English Braille, American Edition 1994, 2002 revision. (The official standard from the Braille Authority of North America)
 * Instruction manual for Braille Transcribing (New 2009 Edition) from the Library of Congress Braille Transcription and Certification Program

History

 * Proceedings of "Braille 1809–2009: Writing with six dots and its future", international conference held at the Headquarters of UNESCO (Paris) from 5 to 8 January 2009
 * Louis Braille Online Museum—Exhibit tracing the history of braille and the life of Louis Braille.
 * How Braille Began—a detailed history of Braille's origins and the people who supported and opposed the system.
 * Robert B. Irwin's As I Saw It, 1955, gives a history of the "War of the Dots" that ultimately led to the adoption of the English form of the Braille literary code in the United States and the demise of American Braille and New York Point, its main competitors.
 * Making a Newspaper For Sightless Readers: By means of raised dots and lines embossed on manila paper, news of the world is conveyed to the fingertips of the blind Popular Science (monthly, January 1919, page 24–25, Scanned by Google Books)

Documents

 * English Braille: American Edition
 * The Rules of Unified English Braille (PDF)
 * Library of Congress Instructional Manual for Braille Transcribing
 * Details on Braille cell representation
 * Unified (English) Braille Code (including information specific to British Braille)

Legal

 * US copyright exemption for Braille

Computer resources
(Wayback Machine copy)
 * Braille for various scripts
 * Free Braille fonts
 * Free Unicode Braille TTF font (supports all Braille scripts)
 * Free Unicode fonts which include Braille --  Otr500 (talk) 14:08, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

Article issues and classification

 * This article is assessed B-class. There are some issues that need resolving or reassessment. There is a large maintenance tag at the top (June 2022) that the article "needs updating". There is also a tag, marked "Weasel-worded phrases" from May 2019.
 * The B-class criteria #1 states; The article is suitably referenced, with inline citations. It has reliable sources, and any important or controversial material which is likely to be challenged is cited., and #4, The article is reasonably well-written.
 * If someone would, please take a look. -- Otr500 (talk) 04:28, 21 March 2023 (UTC)

Context
I'm in the process of learning Braille, and have just started to understand enough of the ICEB's The Rules of Unified English Braille to start being able to spot differences with this article that either aren't mentioned or aren't clear and will probably be able to start making some of the maintenance edits referenced above within a month. However, given the state and title of the article, I'm skeptical that the best approach is to modify this article to match UEB as proposed by the maintenance tag. ("The article should primarily describe UEB, not EBAE.")

Motivation
To make the problems I see clear and succinct, these are the questions that come to mind:


 * Why delete or modify perfectly good descriptions of EBAE rather than preserve them in a page titled English Braille American Edition?


 * Why put technical content about UEB in the English Braille page rather than the Unified English Braille page that already exists?


 * Why is a page generically titled "English Braille" containing technical content specific to which version of English Braille is being used?

Abstract
Instead of modifying this article to primarily describe UEB, I propose almost all the techincal discussion (specification of encoding) be migrated to a new page for EBAE (titled "English Braille American Edition") and the technical discussion (again, specification of encoding) of UEB be written into the page for Unified English Braille (again, that already exists). Then this English Braille page can link to both of those when appropriate, and otherwise be reserved for history that contexts both and descriptions that apply to both (of which there is plenty already in the summary, History, and Sample sections).

Details
To precisely itemize that proposal, using EB, EBAE, and UEB as abbreviations for the pages here on Wikipedia, I would suggest to:


 * create EBAE (titled "English Braille American Edition")
 * move System section from EB to EBAE, and make a copy in UEB that is modified to reflect UEB first, with at most footnotes about EBAE, if desired
 * move many sections from EB to EBAE:
 * Alphabet
 * Punctuation Marks
 * Formatting Marks
 * Contractions
 * Abbreviations
 * Spacing
 * write sections for UEB analogous to those in the last bullet, perhaps with some footnotes or brief commentary about changes from EBAE, if desired (or if lengthy description of changes is desired, a new section called Differences with ICEB)
 * move the technical part of Unified English Braille section (starting with "The following punctuation is retained:") from EB into UEB
 * ensure EB links to ICEB and UEB appropriately
 * update links on Braille page to go to UEB rather than EB when appropriate
 * perhaps flesh out or tidy up EB a bit more

Concerns
I see a few potential issues with this proposal or its implications that I would like someone either clear up or affirm are not a problem:


 * I have never migrated large sections of articles in Wikipedia, and am afraid I will do it in an "improper" way that flags automated reversions, since superficially it can look like simply deleting whole sections. I also don't know if there's supposed to be more of a discussion process for that.


 * The Unified English Braille page is already starting to get lengthy. Is there any concern to be had about the technical content getting lost in there? Should UEB specification actually go in its own page that the UEB page links to? Or perhaps the specification should go in the UEB page, but some of the content already there should be moved into separate pages? (If I recall correctly, the standard here is to err on the side of letting articles get too long because it's easier to see how to migrate sections out when it's all together.)


 * Isn't the Braille page currently serving the purpose that I'm proposing for the English Braille page to serve? (That is, the Braille paged describes aspects of English Braille that are not specific to which of the recent versions is being used.) Should the English Braille page simply be renamed to English Braille American Edition to mitigate migration efforts rather than go through my proposal? Or, if my proposal is good, afterwards, should parts of the Braille page migrate into English Braille, vice-versa, or neither? At the present moment, it seems most appropriate in my mind that my proposal is good, and then afterwards parts of the Braille page that are specific to English Braille could be moved into the English Braille page. (After all, Braille was originally French, so it may be peculiar to have English-specific technicals in the Braille page. And in any case, it seems peculiar to have the same kind of technical-yet-generic content in both places.)


 * Shouldn't there be other forms of English Braille (for which UEB was unifying) other than EBAE that get an equal footing, pages and all? This page was awfully American-centric to begin with, actually...

What I plan to do
As it stands, I'm not yet equipped with the knowledge of Braille required to make sections in the Unified English Braille page that reflect its technical use, which feels crucial to my proposal. So I plan to wait until then, seeing what discussion comes about here in that time, before I make any of these major changes. --jandew (talk) 13:22, 30 August 2023 (UTC)