[liblouis-liblouisxml] Re: Capital/Emphasis update
- From: "Christo de Klerk" <cjdk@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <liblouis-liblouisxml@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 25 Feb 2015 15:49:23 +0200
Hello all
I have to take issue with the following comment by Susan and I quote: " I do
think it extremely unfortunate that UEB wasn't designed with considerable
input from persons experienced in modern digital encoding." This is just way
off the mark. Joe Sullivan is and has been extremely highly skilled in
modern digital encoding and was the chairperson of Committee II of the UEB
project, the committee whose task it was to assign braille representations
for print symbols. Others on Committee II had similar expertise. The UEB was
developed by experts from 7 countries and I doubt that Susan has any
knowledge about experts from those countries in modern digital encoding who
participated and gave inputs. I was privileged to serve on Committee II with
people like Joe, the late Dr Cranmer, Stephen Phippen from the UK, all
highly skilled people, and I can assure you that the committee constantly
kept in mind factors like computability and accuracy of automated print to
braille and braille to print translation.
Kind regards
Christo
-----Original Message-----
From: liblouis-liblouisxml-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:liblouis-liblouisxml-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Bert Frees
Sent: 25 February 2015 3:17 PM
To: liblouis-liblouisxml@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [liblouis-liblouisxml] Re: Capital/Emphasis update
Dear Susan,
I agree with all your points. Yes, in the end we're stuck with what the
braille authorities decide, and we should strive to support it all. The
non-essential stuff (what you would call recommendations and not
requirements), i.e. for creating "beautiful braille", could indeed be
considered out of scope for liblouis. E.g. things that rely on special
markup or advanced text analysis such as sentence detection.
The DAISY Pipeline effort for identifying additional markup needed for
braille has stalled (for some years now). AFAIK some markup got in DAISY 4,
but DAISY 4 was mostly ignored and now a lot of people are moving to EPUB3.
So yes, maybe this exercise should be taken up again, but mapped to EPUB3.
Bert
Susan Jolly writes:
> Thanks so much Bert for the feedback.
>
> I agree with you that it would be nice if braille systems could avoid
> context-dependent rules. However, I expect that achieving that would
> be a much more difficult problem than it might appear for both
> braille-specific and general reasons. Braille systems have many
> constraints given that they are intended to be human-readable which I
> believe to be the reason for at least some of the context-dependent
> rules. New braille systems also have some obligation to be both
> backwards compatible and future proof in order to avoid unnecessary
difficulties for already-fluent braille readers.
>
> As for general reasons think of what we've learned about the
> complexity of digital encoding of documents. The history of the Text
> Encoding Initiative
> (TEI) illustrates this as does the fact that even DocBook has been
> under development since 1991. Recent examples of the discovery that
> problems can appear more complex the more we learn include I18n, ePub,
> and the Semantic Web.
>
> It is important as far as understanding the current situation to
> remember that many braille systems were defined long before the
> possibility of automatic translation became a reality. Also, at least
> here in the US, many early transcribers enjoyed manual transcribing
> and were very proud of their skills even sometimes to the point of
> hindering the development of automated translation.
>
> From a historical perspective braille transcription was sometimes
> viewed as publishing. So just as a quality print book requires a human
> editor, it shouldn't be surprising that a quality braille book would
> as well. My own feeling about certain rules, such as the definition
> of a passage, which are intended to make braille reading more
> efficient and/or enjoyable is that these rules should be tagged as
recommendations and not requirements.
>
> And, of course, I'm sure we could never get universal agreement on
> what makes a transcription more or less readable. Just remembering
> that there were riots in the UK when they decided to require braille
> capitalization indicators in all contexts underscores this. In my
> opinion some of the arguments both against and for that change were very
well-reasoned.
>
> I do think it extremely unfortunate that UEB wasn't designed with
> considerable input from persons experienced in modern digital encoding.
> Here was an opportunity for a new braille code that looked toward the
> future; instead we are ending up spending huge resources changing to a
> system little different from what was originally proposed as UEBC back
> in 1991.
>
> However, given that we seem to be stuck with UEB, I think it would be
> a worthwhile exercise to determine what, if any, additional markup
> would need to be added to the latest ePub specification in order to
> support fully automatic transcription to UEB translation plus some
> standard formatting prescription. (Or has the DAISY Pipeline effort
> already completed this
> exercise?) I have two reasons for this suggestion.
>
> First is that there is growing expertise outside the braille community
> for producing rich ePub documents including developing efficient
> methods for generating information not present in the starting electronic
document.
> Second is the standard argument for separation of concerns. There is
> more than enough braille-specific detail for braille table designers
> and software developers to handle without having to compensate for
> avoidable deficiencies in input.
For a description of the software, to download it and links to project pages
go to http://www.abilitiessoft.com
For a description of the software, to download it and links to
project pages go to http://www.abilitiessoft.com
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