[BRLTTY] Braille in CLDR

[Nicolas Pitre]

On Mon, 29 May 2006, Samuel Thibault wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> Jason White, le Mon 29 May 2006 17:23:22 +1000, a écrit :
> > On Mon, May 29, 2006 at 09:57:26AM +0300, Erkki Kolehmainen wrote:
> > > The UCS/Unicode standards already contain the encoding of the Braille symbols. 
> > Yes, and I agree this first step is a good idea.
> > > What we are talking here as the first step with CLDR (with the forthcoming 1.5 
> > > as the target release) is to map the symbols (in 6-bit and 8-bit forms) at 
> > > least in each language_country environment (and possibly more refined as 
> > > variants) to the corresponding values (i.e., mostly characters).
> > What are the use cases for this?
> 
> Any braille producer (brltty, gnome-braille, gnopernicus, libbraille,
> sbl, ...) would be able to produce localized braille without asking the
> user to care about tables.

This is not a good enough reason, IMHO, to justify the increased 
complexity/bloat and extra dependencies/ramifications.  And FWIW my own 
braille table doesn't follow any of the current "standards" and I don't 
intend to ever use any of those "standard" braille tables either.

> > Have any implementors of braille software expressed a desire for it?
> 
> At the Accessibility Free Standard Group meeting of last year, there was
> an agreement that such a centralized information pool would be useful
> for these screen readers.  For now, screen readers have very differing
> localization support (just a quick list):
> 
> - brltty: cz, da, de, en_US, en_UK, es, fi1, fi2, fr_CA, fr_FR, it,
> - gnome-braille: ar, cz, da, de, en_UK, en_US, es, fr_CA, fr_FR, hr, it, ja, ko, pl, ru, sv, vi,
> - gnopernicus: de, en_US, es, sv
> - libbraille: de, en_UK, en_US, es, fr, no-h, no-p, sv
> no-h, no-p, pl, ru, se, vi.
> - sbl: fr, de, en_US, en_UK, es, sv
> 
> People might be reduced to choose his screenreader according to the
> braille table it has; that's a bit unfortunate...

That's complete non sense.  Sorry but I just don't believe there can't 
be a simple, really simple way to import braille table definitions from 
one application into another.  In fact people have been doing that since 
BRLTTY's early days even when the BRLTTY table format was a binary file.  
Now BRLTTY that table definitions are text files that is even easier.  
A really simple Perl script can be written to convert braille tables 
from any format into any format if anyone cares.

So saying that people's screen reader choice is limited by the available 
braille table is rather dishonest given your own technical skills.

Braille didn't get invented last month.  Therefore no "standard" will 
ever succeed if imposed on people that never used it in the first place.  
Don't expect people to just use your "standard" just because you call it 
so. Others have tried with Braille before and it didn't work. And no 
standard has any value if it is not actually used.

There are already many (maybe too many) established braille 
standardization bodies world wide with the knowledge and field 
experience.  And yet they are facing no end of issues with braille 
standardization.  There is nothing to gain but more confusion from yet 
another standards group coming along to "standardize" something that is 
clearly not in its field of expertise.


Nicolas