Re: [EXTERNAL] Some braille references

Sounds like something we can bring to the attention of BANA's Nemeth Code Technical Committee. Current members are listed<http://brailleauthority.org/aboutbana/current_directory.html> as...

  *   Dorothy Worthington, Chair
  *   Jennifer Dunnam, Board Liaison
  *   Mary Denault
  *   Dawn Gross
  *   Cindi Laurent
  *   Allison O'Day
  *   Susan Osterhaus
  *   Caryn Navy, Consultant
  *   Jacquie Walker, Consultant
  *   Lindy Walton, Consultant

Since you are already corresponding with Susan Osterhaus, seems like she might be the most likely first contact.

ALSO...looks like there have been a few updates since the old 1972 Nemeth "Green Book," in case there are points which pertain to our discussions: http://www.brailleauthority.org/mathscience/math-science.html


--Steve







Steve Noble
Instructional Designer, Accessibility
Psychometrics & Testing Services

Pearson

502 969 3088
steve.noble@pearson.com<mailto:steve.noble@pearson.com>

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________________________________
From: Neil Soiffer <soiffer@alum.mit.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, July 6, 2021 8:12 PM
To: Murray Sargent <murrays@exchange.microsoft.com>
Cc: deyan.ginev@gmail.com <deyan.ginev@gmail.com>; ljmaher03@outlook.com <ljmaher03@outlook.com>; www-math@w3.org <www-math@w3.org>
Subject: Re: [EXTERNAL] Some braille references

Continuing to stray off-topic... a problem with coming up with a way to encode Unicode technical chars in Nemeth is "who is going to know them?". Basically, it is like display Unicode encoding to a sighted person and expecting them to know U+2146 is the 'd' used in differentials, that U+2BAF is a "black curved rightwards and downwards arrow", etc. In speech, they can be pronounced in some long form if they don't represent some known semantics (e.g,. "in equilibrium with" for  ⇌), but in Braille, basically it will just be some multi-char dot pattern that needs to be looked up. My completely uninformed feeling is that Nemeth (and UEB and ...) should introduce a unicode prefix encoding char and then just give the unicode value for any char not already a part of the code (or at least a unicode value for chars that should already be part of the code). In the case of alphabets though (this case), the obvious thing is to add more prefixes to indicate the alphabet as there are already many such prefixes. Even if the reader doesn't know the "the following is an open face character" prefix dot pattern, they would at least know what the letter is.

It's not in the mandate of the MathML WG to augment braille codes, but it certainly seems reasonable for interested members to get together and come up with a proposal for BANA (Braille Authority of North America), RNIB (Royal National Institute of Blind People) and other braille standards groups on how they should handle math characters not in their codes.Our group has considerable expertise in the characters used in math.

    Neil


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