Unified English Braille Code (UEBC, now usually just UEB) is an English language Braille code developed to permit representing the wide variety of literary and technical material in use in the English-speaking world today. It 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 and still more recently it has come to be called simply Unified English Braille. Standard 6-dot braille only providing 63 distinct characters (not including the space character), a number of distinct rule sets have been developed over the years to represent literary text, mathematics and science, computer software, and other varieties of written material. As a result, braille users who desire 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 were often not compatible from one system to the next so that the reader would need to be notified as the text in a book moved from computer braille code to Nemeth Code, to standard literary braille. Moreover, braille for math and computer science, 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 that can be applied across various types of material and that would also be the same everywhere in the world. 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 including support for specialized math and science symbols, foreign alphabets, and visual effects such as bullets, bold type, accent marks, and so on.
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-language braille that ICEB member countries could consider for adoption as their national code.
As of October 2007, four of the seven ICEB countries have adopted and are in the process of implementing the new code—Australia (May 14, 2005), New Zealand (November 2005), South Africa (May 2004) and Nigeria (February 5, 2005). The major criticism against the code is that it fails to handle mathematics or computer science as compactly as codes designed to be optimal for those disciplines.
On April 24, 2010, the Canadian Braille Authority (CBA) voted to adopt UEB, making Canada the fifth nation to adopt UEB officially. On October 21st, 2011, the UK Association for Accessible Formats voted to adopt UEB as the preferred code in the UK.
New Zealand determined that Maori Braille was compatible with UEB, and would not be modified.
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