[BRLTTY] Braille in CLDR

[Nicolas Pitre]

On Fri, 26 May 2006, Samuel Thibault wrote:

> But this looks like an already known problem: "should the screen reader
> use contracted braille or plain braille", which I guess is already
> handled by screen readers (via a shortcut for switching between both
> modes, I guess).

This is not just a guess, but a fact since BRLTTY already supports that 
mode of operation.  Have a look at the content of the ContractionTables 
subdirectory in the BRLTTY source archive for a feel of how complex a 
task that might be.  And this is not including the engine needed to 
compile the abbreviation descriptions and to apply the needed transforms 
in the appropriate context, etc.  And still, especially for French, it's 
almost impossible for those contraction rules to be 100% right all the 
time as some of them require human judgment with exceptions based on how 
a given word is actually pronounced to choose between alternative 
contractions, etc.

Therefore Unicode should really stick to straight braille glyph 
representations and leave more complex transformation/encoding to 
specialized applications.  Otherwise you'll have to consider the Nemeth 
braille code for mathematic symbols, the different musical braille 
codes, etc.  And even the different institutions for the blind around 
the world didn't agree with each other yet on a common standard for 
straight uncontracted braille even in the same language, so...


Nicolas