UEB Modifiers Take on Unicode - SusanJ/UEB_back GitHub Wiki

Back in 2012, when I still thought there was a chance that BANA wouldn't adopt UEB, I posted this article about the issues of representing a large number of characters in a single braille code. Nonetheless, BANA went with UEB.

UEB uses what it calls modifiers to represent letters other than the Basic Latin letters of ordinary English. There are 12 two-cell symbols for specific modifiers—including the solidus, macron, and cedilla—and 3 three-cell symbols for additional modifiers that can be specified by a braille transcriber. A desired small letter is represented by placing the appropriate modifier before the one-cell Latin letter that is visually similar to the intended letter. (Capital letters use modifier symbols which have the one-cell capital letter indicator prepended to the symbol for the modifier used for corresponding small letters.) For example, the circumflex modifier ^% (shown here in ASCII braille) is placed before the braille letter u to represent û which is known to Unicode as "Latin small letter u with circumflex" and the capital circumflex modifier ,^% is placed before the braille letter u to represent Û which is known to Unicode as "Latin capital letter u with circumflex"

Note that modifiers are separate UEB prefix-root symbols that function as indicators affecting the interpretation of the following letter symbol; they are not the leading portion of a symbol for a modified letter.

The braille reader who has memorized the modifiers thus knows the visual appearance of a modified letter and may be able to guess its official Unicode designation and thereby discover its Unicode character code. Of course the downside is that if a word containing one or more of these additional letters is used several times in a document, it can get tedious to keep reading the extra symbols.

Here is how Dr. Nemeth addressed this issue in the NUBS code, his modernized version of his Nemeth code, which BANA considered as an alternative to UEB but chose not to adopt.

The literary code provides a generic accent mark which informs the reader that a letter is accented, but it provides no information as to the nature of the accent mark nor of its position above or below the letter that it affects. This information is readily available to the print reader.

NUBS makes this information available to braille readers who want or need it. However, the mechanism for providing this information is necessarily more cumbersome than is desirable by most people. Therefore, NUBS addresses this problem as follows:

A word which contains accented letters should be brailled according to the current literary code, using dot 4 as the accent mark indicator, at the site where it appears in print. However, the same word, using the NUBS mechanism for showing accented letters [essentially what is used in UEB], should be presented on a Special Symbols Page at the beginning of the volume in which the word appears. If several words with accented letters appear throughout the volume, they should be collected and presented, alphabetically, using a two-column structure. The first column should show the form of the accented word as it appears in the body of the text. The second column would show the same word, using the NUBS mechanism for showing accented letters as described above. This format gives the braille reader access to all of the information about the accent marks that are used as the sighted reader has.