[BRLTTY] Braille in CLDR

[Steven R. Loomis]

Right, different languages in CLDR would almost certainly want to use  
different braille codes.  One question that comes up is whether such  
data should be collected in encoded form or not. For example, for US  
english, I could imagine defining two sets of data, with locales  
named  en_Brai_US_GRADE1 and en_Brai_US_GRADE2  (if one wanted to  
encode grade 1 and grade 2). However, packages such as brltty don't  
require applications to have braille-formatted output, in fact they  
contain transformation tables.   CLDR has Unicode-based  
transforms.     I've looked at the English Braille American Edition,  
for example, it seems to be fairly well defined, although there is  
some context required for special symbols.

Therefore, as regards braille, should CLDR (or, something in CLDR  
format) attempt to provide a repository of transforms between Unicode  
non-braille text and Unicode dot patterns,  or should CLDR attempt to  
encode the actual braille dot patterns?

In the case of encoding the dot-patterns, CLDR would be able to  
provide a repository of information - including abbreviations - for  
things such as language/region translations, dates, times, timezones,  
calendars, measurement systems, etc etc.   This could be useful for  
things such as braille PDAs.   I could imagine that encoding the dot- 
patterns makes sense in situations where you want to optimize the  
braille output, such as on a limited-cell PDA.    CLDR could have a  
very short pattern for displaying the date and time in various forms,  
timezones, etc etc.

libbraille has a list of some other alphabets also: http:// 
libbraille.org/alphabet.php

I'd love to set up a refreshable display and work with it, however  
their prices keep that out of my range for experimentation.  I do  
enjoy experimenting with my pocket slates, unfortunately my fingers  
are still not sensitive enough to read very well.

-s

On May 24, 2006, at 9:00 AM, brltty-request at mielke.cc wrote:
> From: Jason White <jasonw at ariel.its.unimelb.edu.au>
> Date: May 24, 2006 3:31:05 AM PDT
>
> On Wed, May 24, 2006 at 09:59:05AM +0300, Erkki Kolehmainen wrote:
>> The identification of the meaning of the Braille symbols in the  
>> various
>> cultural (language-country) environments is now tentatively  
>> planned for
>> implementation in CLDR 1.5 (the Common Locale Data Repository  
>> maintained by the
>> Unicode Consortium).
> Have they defined with greater precision what information they want to
> collect? For some language/country combinations there are both  
> contracted and
> uncontracted braille codes. Furthermore, there are so-called  
> computer braille
> codes which define braille representations of the printable ASCII  
> character
> set (possibly including other characters as required by the  
> language). I'm not
> sure whether these are always standardized - I suspect not; and  
> they often
> differ from the corresponding uncontracted (Grade I) code to a  
> significant
> extent.
>
> There is an old book, available in print only, called World Braille  
> Usage,
> which resulted apparently from a survey by Unesco. It includes the  
> basic
> alphabet for each alphabetic language and a reference to the  
> braille standards
> in use in the particular country. I can't remember what else it  
> contains, but
> it was published by the Library of Congress in Washington, as I  
> remember.
>
> Before they start collecting information, I think they should work  
> out which
> braille codes they wish to obtain for each language.