[BRLTTY] An authoritative source of information about English computer Braille (was: e d o)

[Elias Oltmanns]

"Lee Maschmeyer" <lee_maschmeyer at wayne.edu> wrote:
[...]
> Here's the list; read in computer braille:
>
> )! ,b$aw91 ! ,we/}n-born1 :}"e !y may
> deriv$ f ,abraham1 ! t5t (! ,b$aw9 yet
>  tribesm5 l ! ,b$aw9 he mi<t h got a
>  (! 9habitants1 :o >e ,b$aw9s 7& !y s.d

To me, this came as rather a severe shock. Although I always thought I
was reasonably familiar with Braille Grade II, I honestly couldn't make
the least sense of these examples. That was until I had the brilliant
idea to switch to the English Braille table in the preferences menu. Now
I'm relieved to know that my knowledge of Grade II isn't too bad after
all, which is rather what I'd expected because I have read several books
and other material in that system. I realise, however, that English
computer Braille is quite different from what I had expected. Especially
punctuation marks and other symbols are often hard to guess since they
are represented quite differently in German. So, I'm wondering whether
you might have some tips as to how I might most easily make myself
familiar with English computer Braille.

The reason for my question is this: I was rather bewildered when I first
heard about screen reader support for Grade II (I don't quite remember
whether this was actually BRLTTY or some Windows screen reader). More to
the point, I never considered braille contraction particularly suitable
for in a computer environment where I'm constantly switching from
reading (or writing) English texts to German texts or working with LaTeX
and doing various other stuff. Now, that I come to think of it, I find
it quite intriguing to have the ability to switch on braille contraction
when reading something from the Gutenberg project or similar stuff in
English. Generally, it might even be possible for emacs to communicate
with BRLTTY through the API so I can automatically switch on contraction
when reading this list, for instance. But to make all this worthwhile, I
have to get more proficient in computer braille so as not to be confused
when stumbling upon an unexpected ; or similar things.

Regards,

Elias