A brief history in publishing braille standards

This document’s purpose is only to have as a test document, like our old standard documents for sighted readers. This text is not necessarily historically accurate.

The history

Many years ago, we started to publish braille standards for the sighted audience with a true type of font called «Block.ttf». With his font it was possible to write all 6-dot symbols, and most of them with a single key on the keyboard. By using the visual letters a-z the font shows the corresponding braille letter, as below. Be aware that the Block.ttf font has to be installed on your computer for the braille character,

⠁⠀⠃⠀⠉⠀⠙⠀⠑⠀⠋⠀⠛⠀⠓⠀⠊⠀⠚

⠅⠀⠇⠀⠍⠀⠝⠀⠕⠀⠏⠀⠟⠀⠗⠀⠎⠀⠞

⠥⠀⠧⠀⠺⠀⠭⠀⠽⠀⠵

The Norwegian letters æ ø å are written by typing @ 9 1, like this: ⠜⠀⠪⠀⠡, with the Block-font.

The nice old font

The Block.ttf font have no metadata that tell us where it originally came from. But from the braille signs connected to numbers, we believe it is European. Anyhow, this font was easy to read for sighted people. Nice round shape and size on the dots. And maybe most important, a faint dot, almost like a shadow, for the not raised dots. This makes it easier to distinct between similar signs, like an ⠋ dot 1, 2, 4, and ⠖dot 2, 3, 5.

Other signs that could be easy to mix up could be
⠀⠁ dot 1 and⠀⠈ dot 4.
⠀⠂ dot 2 and⠀⠐ dot 5.
⠀⠄ dot 3 and⠀⠠ dot 6.

This font was used in MS-Word and PDF documents for the sighted audience.

What is a font?

A computer treats every sign as a number. A capital “A” is treated as the number 65 or U+0041 inside the core of a computer. The font is a description, like a picture that tells how this sign should be written on the computer screen, or on an ink printer.

Why hold on two different documents for the same standard

The drawback with the “sighted document” is that you must use the correct 8-dot braille table to get it right on your braille display, when using a screen reader. And this braille table is not the standard braille table used in Norway. The letters a to z will always be correct, but not necessarily other signs. Below there is a table with different characters in Block font, the dot numbers that are shown to sighted people, and the character in a standard font.

The finger friendly 6-dot version of the standard was of course printed on paper. But there where also made an electronic version. Since 8-dot uncontracted braille is the most common in Norway, we had to look for the 6-dot pattern in the 8-dot to write the correct characters. If someone used something else than the standard 8-dot table, some characters would show up with incorrect dot pattern.

Unicode braille block

In the 90’s the braille signs were implemented as a part of the standard font table. These block of 256 characters can show every combination of 8 dot braille. A few computer fonts can show these characters in a document or on a computer screen. The excellent benefit from these characters is that they represent the exact dot combination. A character with dot 1 has the corresponding value U+2801. When using these characters the computer know the correct combination of dots. And a screen reader should also treat these as real braille characters, no matter which braille table that’s used. It is the same characters that are used in PEF files.

The translation and the new font

We believed that if we translated the characters written in block font to the corresponding characters in the Unicode braille block, we would have one version of the standard document that could be read correctly in braille, independent of the braille table used. And use the same document for sighted users. Lars Bjørndal made the code for the translation. But the new document was not so eye friendly as the old one. The block font did not support the characters in the Unicode braille block. And the fonts that we tested where not as easy to read for sighted users. To get the same look on the new document we asked Jan Martin Kvile if he could make a font, supporting the braille characters, and with a similar look as the old Block font.

This was the history, and this is how we publish our standards on the web today.