Бірыңғай ағылшын тіліндегі Брайль кодексі

Braille standard for the English language
Unified English Braille Code (UEBC, formerly UBC, now usually simply UEB) is an English language Braille code standard, developed to encompass the wide variety of literary and technical material in use in the English speaking world today, in uniform fashion.

Standard 6 dot braille only provides 63 distinct characters (not including the space character), and thus, over the years a number of distinct rule sets have been developed to represent literary text, mathematics, scientific material, computer software, the @ symbol used in email addresses, and other varieties of written material. Different countries also used differing encodings at various times: during the 1800s American Braille competed with English Braille and New York Point in the War of the Dots. As a result of the expanding need to represent technical symbolism, and divergence during the past 100 years across countries, braille users who desired to read or write a large range of material have needed to learn different sets of rules, depending on what kind of material they were reading at a given time. Rules for a particular type of material were often not compatible from one system to the next (the rule sets for literary/mathematical/computerized encoding areas were sometimes conflicting—and of course differing approaches to encoding mathematics were not compatible with each other), so the reader would need to be notified as the text in a book moved from computer braille code for programming to Nemeth Code for mathematics to standard literary braille. Moreover, the braille rule set used for math and computer science topics, and even to an extent braille for literary purposes, differed among various English speaking countries.

Work on UEB formally began in 1991, and preliminary draft standard was published in March 1995 (as UBC), then upgraded several times thereafter. Unified English Braille (UEB) was originally known as Unified Braille Code (UBC), with the English specific nature being implied, but later the word "English" was formally incorporated into its name—Unified English Braille Code (UEBC)—and still more recently it has come to be called Unified English Braille (UEB). On April 2, 2004, the International Council on English Braille (ICEB) gave the go ahead for the unification of various English braille codes. This decision was reached following 13 years of analysis, research, and debate. ICEB said that Unified English Braille was sufficiently complete for recognition as an international standard for English braille, which the seven ICEB member countries could consider for adoption as their national code. South Africa adopted the UEB almost immediately (in May 2004). During the following year, the standard was adopted by Nigeria (February 5, 2005), Australia (May 14, 2005), and New Zealand (November 2005). On April 24, 2010, the Canadian Braille Authority (CBA) voted to adopt UEB, making Canada the fifth nation to adopt UEB officially. On October 21, 2011, the UK Association for Accessible Formats voted to adopt UEB as the preferred code in the UK. On November 2, 2012, the Braille Authority of North America (BANA) became the sixth of the seven member countries of the ICEB to officially adopt the UEB.

The major criticism against UEB is that it fails to handle mathematics or computer science as compactly as codes designed to be optimal for those disciplines. Besides requiring more space to represent and more time to read and write, the verbosity of UEB can make learning mathematics more difficult. Nemeth Braille, officially used in the United States since 1952, and as of 2002 the de facto standard for teaching and doing mathematics in braille in the US, was specifically invented

The key difference of Nemeth Braille compared to Taylor (and UEB which uses an upgraded version of the Taylor encoding for math) is that Nemeth uses "down shifted" numerals from the fifth decade of the Braille alphabet (overwriting various punctuation characters), whereas UEB/Taylor uses the traditional 1800s approach with "up shifted" numerals from the first decade of the (English) Braille alphabet (overwriting the first ten letters, namely ABCDEFGHIJ). Traditional 1800s braille, and also UEB, require insertion of numeral prefixes when speaking of numerals, which makes representing some mathematical equations 42% more verbose. and most recently these were the subject of various technical workshops during 2012. Although UEB adopts some features of Nemeth, the final version of UEB mandates up shifted numerals, despite the use of contradictory representation of numerals and arithmetical symbols in the UEB and Nemeth encodings. Thus, although UEB has officially been adopted in most English speaking ICEB member countries, in the USA (and possibly the UK where UEB is only the "preferred" system) the new encoding is not to be the sole encoding. Another proposed braille notation for encoding math is GS8/GS6, which was specifically invented in the early 1990s as an attempt to get rid of the "up shifted" numerals used in UEB—see Gardner–Salinas Braille. GS6 implements "extra dot" numerals from the fourth decade of the English Braille alphabet (overwriting various two letter ligatures). GS8 expands the braille cell from 2×3 dots to 2×4 dots, quadrupling the available codepoints from the traditional 64 up to 256, but in GS8 the numerals are still represented in the same way as in GS6 (albeit with a couple unused dot positions at the bottom). Attempts to give the numerals their own distinct position in braille are not new: the original 1829 specification by Louis Braille gave the numerals their own distinct symbols, with the modern digraph based literary braille approach mentioned as an optional fallback. However, after trying the system out in the classroom, the dashes used in the numerals—as well as several other rows of special characters—were found to be too difficult to distinguish from dot pairs, and thus the typical digraph based numerals became the official standard in 1837.