Unified English Braille

Unified English Braille Code (UEBC, formerly UBC, now usually simply UEB) is an English language Braille code standard, developed to permit representing 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, in the War of the Dots. As a result of the expanding need to represent technical symbolisms, 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 that 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.

Unified English Braille is intended to develop one set of rules, the same everywhere in the world, which could be applied across various types of English-language material. The notable exception to this unification is Music Braille, which UEB specifically does not encompass, because it is already well-standardized internationally. Unified English Braille is designed to be readily understood by people familiar with the literary braille (used in standard prose writing), while also including support for specialized math and science symbols, computer-related symbols (the @ sign as well as more specialised programming-language syntax), foreign alphabets, and visual effects (bullets, bold type, accent marks, and so on).

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