BA/5/04
From: Bill Poole (Chair)
To: Members of BAUK and others (including the International Forum and RNIB TCS Committee)
Date: 14 June 2004
Subject: Report on the Third General Assembly of ICEB
1. The Third General Assembly (GA) of the International Council on English Braille (ICEB) met in Toronto, Canada, between Monday 29 March and Friday 2 April 2004. It was preceded and followed by a meeting of the ICEB Executive. Seven countries (Australia, Canada, New Zealand (NZ), Nigeria, South Africa (SA), the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States (US)) participated, and each was entitled to send up to four delegates. The UK sent only three, Hans Cohn, Stephen Phippen and myself, since Mike Townsend had to drop out at the last moment. However, at the GA decisions are made on the basis of one country one vote. I am grateful to my colleagues for the contributions which they made to the discussions and for the help and support which they gave me. This report will focus on five major areas: resolutions, committee reports, conference papers, elections and aftermath. I would like to take this opportunity to express my warmest appreciation of the hospitality and resources provided by the Canadian Braille Authority (CBA) and the Canadian National Institute for the Blind (CNIB), who jointly hosted this assembly and helped to make our stay in Canada thoroughly enjoyable.
2. Altogether we passed fifteen resolutions, all of them except the first unanimously. The achievement of this degree of consensus was in large measure due to the skilful and sensitive chairmanship by Mary Schnackenberg (NZ) of the Resolutions Committee, of which I also was one of the members. But on the first resolution, which was the most contentious as well as the most important, the UK abstained, in accordance with a decision taken by BAUK at its meeting on 17 March, in the expectation that a resolution of this kind would be put to the vote. (9 BAUK members voted for abstention, 5 for opposition, 2 for a free hand, and none voted to support such a resolution.) The resolution, after significant amendments by three delegations, declared three things: "that the Unified English Braille Code is sufficiently complete"; that it "be recognized as an international standard for English braille"; and that it should be referred "to ICEB members for consideration and possible adoption by their national braille authorities after due consultation with their braille users and other stakeholders." I was responsible for inserting the requirement for consultation with braille users, and I also argued that the code could not be regarded as complete, and therefore could not be recommended as an international standard, mainly because no agreement had yet been reached on the rules governing the use of contractions. As people who borrow books from the US will be aware, British usage in this respect is much more liberal than American, and at a meeting of the relevant ICEB committee in London in May 2000 we had undertaken to try to resolve the differences. But in the absence of sufficient progress on this, I argued that the code could not yet be said to be unified, though it would be open to individual countries to adopt it as their national standard, using their own contraction rules. I failed to convince most people.
3. There were other important resolutions relating to the Unified English Braille Code (UEBC). Resolution 2 urged "that the Project Committee and its working committees be dissolved; and that the Executive Committee be charged with establishing whatever committees are required ... to complete the task". The Executive following the GA has embarked on this restructuring by setting up an Overarching Committee, but work on the lower tier remains to be completed. Resolution 3 calls for "the development of UEBC-related training materials for transcribers, teachers, and learners". Resolution 4 asks "that ICEB establish a committee to coordinate ... research among the member countries", and subsequent resolutions go on to specify some of the topics that should be addressed. I was the sponsor of resolution 5, which states "that the impact of the proposed UEBC on writing generally and on the learning of foreign languages ... needs to be researched as a matter of urgency"; to which another delegation added a reference to the learning of mathematics. Resolutions 8 and 9 were concerned to "continue the work of developing format guidelines", especially in relation to elementary educational materials.
4. Other resolutions dealt with non-UEBC matters. Resolution 12 outlines a programme for ICEB to encourage the creation of braille councils in developing countries. Resolution 13 "affirms the principle of unrestricted international interlending of reading materials in alternative formats among recognized blindness agencies." It aims to develop a process to give non-US citizens "access to braille and other accessible format materials produced in the United States". Finally, resolution 14 "endorses the proposed establishment by the World Blind Union of the World Braille Council and requests the ICEB Executive Committee to facilitate participation in the WBC by ICEB and its affiliated braille authorities". I have been involved with others in drafting the constitution for this proposed body. Hopefully the Council will concern itself mainly with braille promotion issues, but one of its declared objectives is to try to unify the braille representation of common signs across language groups. This, if it gets anywhere, could have an impact on UEBC.
5. The UEBC committee chairs presented their reports and fielded a wide range of questions arising out of the debates which followed. Topics discussed varied from the very general to the highly specific, and I shall not attempt to deal with any of the detailed technical issues which we considered. Darleen Bogart (Canada), the Project Director, began by presenting the report of the Project Committee, to which all the other committees were subordinate. She stressed that all committee reports and rules presented to the GA had been approved by the Project Committee. At the beginning of January many of the rules had either not yet been written or were only in drafts which were known to be seriously imperfect. It is greatly to the credit of four people that most of the above deficiencies were remedied by the time we came to meet at the end of March. These were: Antonnette Botha (SA), Chair of Committee VI (transcriber rules); Reinette Popplestone (SA), Chair of Committee V (formatting); Phyllis Landon (Canada), who did the bulk of redrafting of the literary rules; and Janet Reynolds (NZ), who did the same for the mathematical rules. There was, however, a down side to all this, for which none of these four people should feel responsible, namely that, in my opinion, we simply did not give ourselves enough time before the GA to give some of these documents the detailed scrutiny they needed; so there is still a good deal of tidying up work to be done. This particularly applies to the work of Committee III (contractions), to which I have already alluded, and also with regard to formatting. In both these areas a wide diversity of opinion was expressed, but it should not be concluded from this, as some speakers were inclined to do, that no agreement can ever be reached. I take the view that solutions which are acceptable to most people can almost always be found, even if quite a lot of people do not end up with their outcome of first choice.
6. Darleen also referred in the presentation of her report to the major evaluation of the code carried out by the International Braille Research Center (IBRC) in Baltimore in 1997. The code is now significantly less fluid than it was then, and it is generally recognized that further research will need to be done. Among the areas causing most concern and disagreement are the following: The extent to which typeform indicators, perceived by many as mere clutter, will be dispensed with in practice, given the opposition of many producing agencies to exemption schemes generally; the extent to which formatting should be treated as a matter of house style, rather than as international legislation; the impact on reading speed of the extra cells required in UEBC because of the abolition of all sequences and some major contractions; the impact on speed and comprehension of the extra cells required in certain branches of mathematics; and finally the effect on the acquisition of foreign languages of the cumbersome treatment of modified letters and non-Roman scripts. As regards this last point, I wrote on behalf of Committee IV (interface between UEBC and foreign languages) a first draft of the guidelines for deciding when to use UEBC and when to use indigenous code signs in the writing of foreign language material. This had a surprisingly good reception, considering that I had no time to consult with other people over much of the detail. One of the tasks that will face the successor to Committee IV will be devising a representation of phonetic script which conforms with UEBC principles. I cannot leave the subject of committee reports without paying tribute to Joe Sullivan (US), Chair of Committee II (extension of the base code and reader rules), for the colossal achievement by him and his team in producing their final report. I have always found him courteous in debate, and tirelessly patient in explaining tricky points of detail and responding to criticism.
7. Five papers were presented to the GA, largely by external contributors; so we set aside Wednesday for their discussion, so that everyone could be present to participate. Most of them were by more than one author. The first was an account of the development of a unified braille code for Japanese, encompassing technical material and involving very little alteration to traditional Japanese braille signs. This was highly commended by everyone. The second and third papers were discussed together. The second was a reissue of Abe Nemeth's 1995 paper arguing that without the use of lower numbers as in his own code much maths written in UEBC would be cumbersome to read and interpret. The third paper was a reply to this, prepared under the direction of the CBA. It conducted a frequency count of numeral, letter and capital signs in contact with alphabetic characters and punctuation signs and argued that, taken over a wide range of mathematical material, UEBC using standard numbers was overwhelmingly superior in terms of cell count to the Nemeth maths code in this respect. However, as was pointed out in the discussion, it took no account of right hand characters used in parts of signs of operation and comparison to distinguish them from punctuation.
8. The final two papers were commissioned by the CBA, but their actual findings (as opposed to their methodology) were not released until shortly before the GA discussion. In fact the final paper was not distributed until the close of the afternoon session on Tuesday. I still managed to find time to read it right through. The fourth paper aimed to assess the effect on reading speeds of the loss of contractions and sequences in UEBC and the extra cells needed for elementary algebra. I had doubts about some of the methodology, and some of the work had had to be redone because of a misunderstanding over the interpretation of UEBC rules; nevertheless, I was convinced that a real loss in code efficiency had been identified. Others I think would dispute this. The fifth paper was to me by far the most interesting. It attempted through the use of focus groups to ascertain the perceived impact of the adoption of UEBC on various categories of braille user, but especially those whose school or university work would be affected by the transition to the new code. The most commonly adduced reason for supporting UEBC was the belief that it would facilitate the international exchange of braille materials. But some people were anxious about having to work in two codes for an indefinite period at a crucial time in their educational development, and they were unhappy about having to relearn a basic skill which they thought they had acquired for life. They were also concerned about the costs of transition. There were a lot of comments both detailed and general, and some of them were vitriolic. I have no idea how representative these views are of Canadian braille users generally, but if I were one of them I would want to find out. The CBA is to be commended for having stimulated three separate research papers, and for starting to ask questions to which legislators will need to find answers.
9. The following nine people were elected to form the new Executive: President, Fred Schroeder (deterritorialized); Immediate Past President, Darleen Bogart (Canada); Vice President, Mary Schnackenberg (NZ); Secretary, Jean Obi (Nigeria); Treasurer, Eileen Curran (US); Public Relations Officer, Bill Jolley (Australia); Members at Large: Antonnette Botha (SA); Bill Poole (UK); Reinette Popplestone (SA). As there was no challenge to the slate put up by the Nominations Committee, they were all returned unopposed. Every country is represented on this Executive, though there is no constitutional requirement that this should be so. The constitution is recognized to have defects which need to be remedied, but the Byelaws Committee, which has responsibility in this area, did not meet during the last cycle. It is to be hoped that things will be different this time. The new Executive has acknowledged the need to tighten up its monitoring procedures and other operational practices, especially with regard to committees which do not form part of the UEBC project.
10. There have been a number of developments since the new Executive met. The Public Relations Officer has issued his first upbeat news release, indicating that the assembly has given a green light to the development of UEBC. Since then four countries (Canada, Australia, NZ and SA) have indicated their intention to embark on an implementation process, though sometimes in qualified terms. BAUK will have to decide at its meeting on 7 July what action to take. I have publicly stated more than once that I would not be party to the ratification of the code until after proper consultation with our primary braille users. We are all waiting to see what the US will decide to do when the Braille Authority of North America (BANA) holds its next meeting in early November. Canada and NZ, the other members of BANA, are among the keenest to go ahead with the new code. At the GA the US delegation was deeply divided, having two members in favour of the code and two against. It is known that their two big consumer organizations, the Federation and the Council, are both hostile, and will be discussing the matter at their conventions in early July; but they only have one seat each on BANA, which is dominated numerically by producing agencies. On the ICEB Executive I am now the only openly sceptical member.