Thank you Kathy, for the schooling. I have only recently (October 2016)
acquired certification in braille transcription, and UEB is the only form
of braille that I am certified to produce. In my case, while the
standing-alone rule seems straightforward I regularly find myself over- or
under-interpreting its limits! (And obviously I have other things to
solidify in my knowledge and skills...)
_don
On Sat, Apr 15, 2017 at 12:01 AM, Riessen, Kathy (SA School for Vision
Impaired) <
Kathleen.Riessen440@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
We adopted UEB in Australia 11 years ago now, and it wasn't until the Rule<snip>
Book was finalised and we worked on the Australian Training Manual that I
discovered the importance of unlearning what I knew, and starting my
knowledge of braille rules from scratch.
The two concepts which I needed to get my head around are the Standing
Alone Rule and the rules for Lower Signs.
I also needed to grasp how to use the Shortform List in determining longer
words which can contain shortforms.
The Standing Alone Rule affects both Wordsigns and Shortforms.
It is applied to a string of characters between spaces, hyphens or dashes.
consider the fictional electronic address
braille-for-us.org
The three separate strings separated by hyphens are "braille", "for" and "
us.org"
"braille" is standing alone so the shortform may be used.
"for" is a strong wordsign, so the contraction may be used.
in "us.org", the "us" is is not standing alone as there are characters
following the fullstop, thus the "us" wordsign may not be used.
correct UEB would be brl-=-us4org
If the address was in fact brl-for-us.org
then the grade 1 indicator is required. ;brl-=-us4org (see 5.7.2 in the
rulebook)
Another important rule to remember with regards to electronic addresses is
that as soon as you have a number, grade 1 mode is initiated and no
contractions, wordsigns or shortforms should be used until the next space,
hyphen dash or grade 1 terminator.
In the longer examples you gave of loveletters.org and
childbereavement.org
you need to always look at the whole string to apply the rules. As these
strings break the standing alone rules as the fullstop is in the middle of
the string, no wordsigns or shortforms can be used, even if they were
allowable on the shortform list.
However, other contractions may be used. So
loveletters.org become lovelett]s4org and
childbereavement.org becomes *ildb]1ve;t4org
With regards to theatreroyal.org
Correct UEB would not have the er between theatre and royal contracted as
per 10.11.1 of the Rulebook.
DBT does not always recognise compound words, as in this case, but a good
transcriber would preempt this and ensure the contraction wasn't used. I
use the code [/] in DBT for this purpose.
However, I have found that the list of common compound words which DBT
translates correctly increases with each update.
I hope this all helps.
Whilst it appears complex, I am finding that people who are now learning
braille from scratch, do not seem to have the same hangups over these
issues than those of use who have had to unlearn existing concepts.
Keep up the good work, and keep asking questions.
Kathy Riessen
Coordinator Accessible Format Production
South Australian School for Vision Impaired
Tel: 08 8277 5255
Email: Kathleen.Riessen440@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
