Forum on Library Services for People with Disabilities
Braille: Creation, Funding, Collections, Deposit Publications
By Geoff Payne, General Manager, Information Services, Vision Australia Foundation for the Forum on Library Services for People with Disabilities, March 2002
Braille
Braille is a system of reading, writing and printing by embossing dots onto paper which can then be read by touch. Braille is encoded using a matrix of six dots to represent each code. Special Braille codes are used to study subjects such as mathematics, chemistry and music whose print representations require symbols beyond the alphabet and numerals.
Literacy and Braille
Braille is a primary literacy medium for a blind person. It is a means of reading and writing which offers similar flexibility to pen and paper for a sighted person. Braille is fundamental to the education of blind children, and research has shown that blind people who are literate in Braille have higher employment rates and educational levels, are financially more self-sufficient, and spend more time reading (Ryles, 1996).
Grade 1 Braille and Grade 2 Braille
Grade 1 Braille has a one to one correspondence between each Braille letter and the printed letter, and is useful for teaching spelling and learning Braille. Learning to spell is essential to the use of dictionaries, encyclopedias, the Internet and electronic documents. It is also essential to communication in writing with sighted people. Grade 1 Braille comprises only the letters of the alphabet, numbers and punctuation marks. It is rarely used for published Braille in this country, but is used extensively in Europe and in many parts of the developing world.
Grade 2 (or contracted) Braille replaces commonly occurring words or letter groupings with particular codes, is much faster to read and write and reduces the volume of the Braille document.
Thus a mixture of Grade 1 and Grade 2 Braille is required in libraries to meet the needs of people learning Braille as distinct from those familiar with Braille.
Braille Codes
A single Braille cell of six dots can represent a space and 63 other characters. While this is sufficient to represent the letters and figures of the roman alphabet, and these basic codes are almost universally adopted, other symbols need sequences of Braille cells to represent them. Braille codes have been developed to allow the rendering in Braille of the literature of many different fields. For various reasons Australian, English and American Braille codes all differ, precluding the exchange of Braille files and Braille teaching resources between our countries.
Braille Standardisation
The Australian Braille Authority (ABA) has been working within the International Council on English Brailles Unified Braille Code project. This project is striving to produce a single Braille code to embrace all areas except Music. The blurring of the boundaries between Computing and other disciplines also encourages this development. The ABAs paper Braille 2000 describes these efforts in detail.
While the ABA does not see continuing use of unique Braille codes in Australia as a defensible option, completion the Unified English Braille Code is not yet to the point where it could be adopted. A decision on its adoption is scheduled for the 2004 meeting of the International Council on English Braille.
Braille Creation
Braille is typically prepared on a computer system and output to a Braille embosser.
Just as style manuals exist for formatting of print documents to make them easy to read there are formatting conventions which need to be observed to produce reader friendly Braille. These, and the ambiguities of written English make it difficult to achieve software based translation between text files and Braille files without some manual reformatting.
The translation of literary works into literary Braille is well supported by software such as Duxbury and Megadots. These programs allow documents to be translated from formats such as Microsoft Word into Braille for reading on refreshable Braille displays or producing hard copy on an embosser.
Software to support production of works in the other Australian Braille Codes (for example mathematics) is not available, in contrast to that available for preparing documents conforming to the Braille Codes for these subjects in Britain and North America.
Braille transcribers in Australia
There are very few Braille transcribers and teachers in Australia with expertise in the Braille codes relating to specific subject areas. There is only one tertiary on-campus course offering Braille training, others offer distance training.
XML Extensible Mark-up Language
The Digital Accessible Information System (DAISY) standard provides for the production of digital talking books comprising text marked up in XML and spoken audio. The text can be used for navigation and the audio reading commenced at points corresponding to headings and other elements of the text.
Software such as Duxbury can translate the XML text file into Braille, meaning multiple formats can be produced from a single text file which has been suitably marked up in XML. This capability is only just coming into production.
Instructional Materials Accessibility Act in the United States and similar moves in Australia
Many States in the US require that school textbooks be made available in Braille format by publishers. To achieve standardisation across the various States the sector has proposed the draft Instructional Materials Accessibility Act 2001, which:
- aims at ensuring that students who are blind or visually impaired, or who have other print disabilities, have access to instructional materials in formats they can use at the same time such materials are provided to students without disabilities by requiring states to develop and implement state-wide plans designed to meet this objective;
- requires publishers of instructional materials to prepare well-structured, standardized electronic files corresponding to the print instructional materials they publish to facilitate substantially more timely and efficient production of accessible textbooks and related materials in braille, large print, digital audio and other specialized formats;
- establishes and funds a national repository to be responsible for the receipt, cataloging, storage and distribution of the standardized electronic files provided by publishers;
- provides for the establishment of a single national electronic file format to be used by publishers in the preparation of such files, and allows sufficient time from the publication of the file format standards until their effective date to ensure a smooth transition to these upgraded standards;
- supplants existing state law file format requirements only after the transition period is completed (i.e., two years from the date of publication of the new national file format standards);
- makes U.S. Department of Education "grants for capacity-building" available to states/local educational agencies or nonprofits to assist them with training personnel to effectively utilize the new national file format and production technologies, and authorizes federal appropriations for this purpose for five years;
- provides for enforcement of these provisions under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act.
Braille printing in Australia
There is no facility in Australia with capacity to produce large volumes of printed Braille in a similar fashion, for example, to the Braille Institute in Los Angeles.
Recommendations
- That the National Library work with the National Information Library Service and others to establish a file server on which Braille files can be mounted to facilitate their sharing as a resource amongst Australia Braille Readers.
- That the National Library support the work of the Australian Braille Authority in its work towards the development and adoption of the Unified English Braille Code in Australia.
- That the National Library explore the practicality of accepting XML files in lieu of hard copy as the legal deposit copy of materials published in Australia, with the objective of producing alternative format versions in Braille (and other alternative formats to standard print) on request. That the initial focus of this work be focussed on providing Braille versions of text books used in Australian schools.
- That the National Library work with the sector to establish the mechanisms to achieve the objectives of the proposed Instructional Materials Accessibility Act in the Australian context.
References
Visually Impaired Resource Guide: Learning Skills / Writing Overview,
[by] Special Education Technology British Columbia, 1999
http://www.setbc.org/projects/virg/writing.html
Gray, Liz, About Braille 1998
Australian Braille Authority, Braille 2000 : Meeting the Challenges of
a New Millennium, 1999
www.bca.org.au/brl2000m.htm
Instructional Materials Accessibility Act draft legislation and
enactment strategy
http://www.afb.org/info_document_view.asp?documentid=1572
Braille literacy : report of an Australian national survey of Braille teachers and support staff by Frances Gentle, Sydney, St Edmunds School for the Blind and Vision Impaired, January 2000
In Australia : Braille literacy matters, [by] Dr Gillian Gale. Sydney,
Renwick College, [2000?]
http://www.icevi.org/publications/educator/Fall_01/article7.htm
Ryles, R., The impact of Braille Reading Skills on Employment, Income,
Education and Reading Habits in Journal of Vision Impairment and Blindness, Vol
90, No. 3, pp 219-226
http://www.braille.org/papers/jvib0696/vb960311.htm
