[BRLTTY] Localized Braille Paterns

[Erkki Kolehmainen]

I've made the following contribution to the Unicode Common Locale Data 
Repository (CLDR) Technical Committee:

"The encodings for the Braille patterns have been defined in Unicode as 
U+2800-U+28FF.

The meaning of these patterns is, however, dependent on the combination 
of language, script and country. A pattern can represent a single 
character or even some expression.

Having the localized meanings available in CLDR would provide for an 
overall enhancement of the support for the blind in computer applications."

I understand that the BRLTTY project has collected a representative 
number of local meanings of the Braille patterns. It could be mutually 
helpful if that data were made available for the CLDR project and if the 
additional data submitted for the CLDR from other sources would be used 
in the BRLTTY project.

The above mentioned ISO/IEC 10646 - Unicode encodings are for the 8-bit 
patterns. I've understood that the 6-bit patterns are not necessarily 
perfect subsets of the 8-bit patterns, in which case the question 
arises, whether the 6-bit patterns should also be included in the 
localization data - or - could they be ignored by now.

I'd appreciate any advise and thoughts that you might have on the 
subject. I've been assigned the responsibility to act as the current 
CLDRTC interface for this.

For more information on CLDR see http://www.unicode.org/cldr .

Sincerely,

Erkki I. Kolehmainen
Coordinator, Cultural Diversity Issues in ICT
Research Institute for the Languages of Finland (RILF)
tel. +358 400 825 943

For more information on RILF see http://www.kotus.fi/inenglish/ .
The pages for my particular project at RILF are in Finnish only at 
http://www.kotoistus.fi .