Braille-8 — The unified braille Unicode system: Presenting an ideal unified system around 8-dot Braille Unicode for the braille users world-over

Abstract

Traditional Braille is a 6-dot code that can represent maximum 64 unique symbols with each braille cell. This is grossly insufficient to represent even ordinary English text (comprising 26 small letters, 26 capital letters, 10 digits, and 14 basic punctuations) — let alone math and science symbols. Thus a braille user has to enter 2 (and sometime 3 or 4) braille cells to enter one character or symbol. This makes braille writing very slow and tedious. Incidentally, 8-dot Braille Unicode was introduced to facilitate the Computer Braille that could represent all 95 computer characters with one braille cell itself. Since 8-dot braille can represent maximum 256 unique symbols, it has huge potential to provide the ultimate solution to all woes faced by braille users while writing texts (in English or in native languages) as well as mathematical and technical text. This paper presents a comprehensive unified braille Unicode system providing a detailed mapping of 8-dot braille Unicode pattern to represent the transcribing codes (in English or any other language) as well as the math, science, and computer symbols/characters — mostly with one braille cell itself.