[BRLTTY] Braille in CLDR

[Jason White]

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.