In searching for 8-dot braille on the WEB I've discovered a number of recent
articles about 8-dot braille carried out by researchers from Greece. I've
not yet been able to find accessible versions of these articles but will
continue to try.
One study compared reading times and other factors for 6-dot and 8-dot
braille read on a braille display. The participants were eight experienced
braille readers aged 20 to 40. What struck me was the wide variation in
reading times for just the base case. The measured reading times for general
informative text in 6-dot braille varied from four to eleven minutes with
the same persons typically being slower or faster than average for both
tests.
More interesting to me is set of articles that attempts to create transition
rules for automatically converting a six-dot braille code to a corresponding
eight-dot one. These rules are based on design principles which are
intended to intended to achieve various objectives such as maintaining a
similarity between corresponding six-dot and eight-dot versions for user
convenience.
Using this method to create an eight-dot version of Greek braille was
apparently very successful. There is ongoing research to extend the
transition rules as necessary to create an eight-dot version of the math and
science notation in the Nemeth code.
SusanJ
For a description of the software, to download it and links to
project pages go to http://liblouis.org
