BA/8/94
From: Bill Poole (Chairman, UBC Committee III);
To: All members of Committee III, all members of the Literary Code Committee of BAUK, all officers of BAUK, Joe Sullivan (Chairman, UBC Committee II), and such other people as the author of the paper, UBC Committee III, or the Literary Code Committee of BAUK may decide;
Subject: Reactions to my paper on proposed alterations by Committee II to the contraction system of grade 2 (circulated to all recipients of this paper);
Date: 24 August 1994.
1. PURPOSE OF PAPER. On 11 July 1994 there was a meeting of the Literary Code Committee of BAUK, at which the main topic of discussion was my paper dated 24 June on proposed alterations to the contraction system of grade 2. The purpose of this paper is to acquaint the members of Committee III with the reactions to my previous paper and to seek their responses to these reactions and to the original paper itself. I will report on the progress of our discussions to Committee II at or before its project meeting in London in January 1995. I should point out here that at its meeting on 20 July BAUK did not have time to consider the appointment of an extra British member to Committee III.
2. GENERAL POINTS. The Literary Code Committee (LCC) began by making a number of points not related to any specific proposal by Committee II with regard to contractions. It felt very strongly that translation from print to braille was much more important than translation in the other direction, and that the emphasis laid on the latter by Committee II (following the project guidelines) was distorting other worth while aims of the project. It recognized that there were some people, such as blind authors, for whom braille to print translation might seem of value, but took the view that their problems could be best addressed by the use of grade 1 and computer code; inputting grade 2 would always lead to difficulties, and this attempted solution would in any case soon be overtaken by technological progress resulting in improved voice inputting. Concern was also expressed that the number of proposed contraction deletions would be regarded as amounting to major change by many ordinary braille users, and some of them were in any case technically unnecessary within the UBC framework. (Examples given included the deletion of COM and the abolition of lower wordsign sequences.) The view was strongly put that the aesthetics of code design were being sacrificed to a rather narrow logic; the elimination of some but not all of the double letter family, and the use of contractions under rules which govern no existing contraction were mentioned as examples, and particular exception was taken to the likely increase in the number of consecutive right hand characters, as being perceptually very awkward for many readers. It was also strongly felt that too high a price in terms of change would have to be paid if it was intended to bring about the situation where it would be possible for print characters in any sequence to be represented in braille without human intervention. The space loss resulting from the implementation of all the Committee II proposals was regarded as significant and likely to have an adverse effect on reading speeds, but the LCC was strongly in favour of cutting back on this loss rather than creating the required number of new contractions to compensate for it, though it was recognized that new contractions are not prohibited by the project guidelines. The LCC supported a "no substitution" policy, that is, it was against giving an existing contraction sign a new meaning, but the precise scope of this restriction was not fully argued out. The LCC also supported the principle of a dual standard for automatically and manually transcribed braille, as outlined in paragraph 19 of my previous paper, provided this was not interpreted as a licence to allow the computerized production of braille to fall below the highest currently achievable standard.
3. SPECIFIC CONTRACTIONS AND CONTRACTION FAMILIES. It was considered that the BLE contraction should stand or fall in its entirety. The option to preserve it at the end of a word provided it was followed by a space was rejected, on the ground that it would then be operating under rules which apply to no other contractions. It was pointed out that the contraction could be saved if the character representing it was prefixed by the grade 1 indicator when it meant the numeral sign, but that this would not be necessary when it was in initial position, which in non-technical contexts was nearly always. No agreement was reached on whether the effort to save the contraction was worth making. On the whole the LCC was in favour of keeping the final letter contractions, but a study into the problems they create was advocated. The difficulties associated with shortforms were acknowledged, but the committee thought that the best way forward was to explore the idea that they should only be combined with specific prefixes and suffixes. I have now received Joe Sullivan's listing of words which contain shortforms embedded within them, so I shall soon be issuing a short separate document offering a suggested solution. Homographs remain an unresolved issue: it was pointed out that acronyms are quite often designed to be ambivalent, but there was hostility to such things as using the contraction for "us" to represent the abbreviation for the United States, on the ground that they impaired readability, which is something the project guidelines are concerned with. Objection was expressed to the asymmetric non-use of the letter sign before single letters which happen also to constitute words, as described in paragraph 15 of my original paper. Since the meeting of 11 July I have received the minutes of the Los Angeles meeting of Committee II held last April, and it contains the latest suggested definition of "standing alone". A word is said to be standing alone if it "constitutes the only letter sequence" between the nearest occurring space, hyphen or dash on either side (my paraphrase, but faithful). This will not do for various reasons. The definition seems to have arisen largely out of Committee II's discussion of shortforms, and it fails to take account of the need for the definition to cover CHARACTERS standing alone. Also a word may be a letter as well as a letter sequence; and, as Joe Sullivan himself realized after his committee's meeting, the shortform "o'c" violates its definition, unless the apostrophe is to be regarded as a letter, in which case we need to know exactly what non- alphabetic characters are allowed to interrupt a letter sequence. I will try to refine this definition, and include it in the document which I have just agreed to circulate, which will as a result be not so short.
4. SEQUENCES. Opinion was divided over sequences. Some people regarded them as a valuable space-saving asset with a long tradition and no lasting problems. Other people felt that they did give rise to problems, which could be alleviated if some form of natural pause rule were restored, though this would not fit well with the UBC goal of 100% automatic translation. It was also reported that children when learning braille found them difficult to understand. It was recognized that those involving upper wordsigns could not be fully automated in braille to print translation, though an accurate version would result in the vast majority of cases.
5. BRAILLE RESEARCH CENTRE. Besides the study of final letter contractions already mentioned in paragraph 3 above, it was agreed that the Braille Research Centre should be asked to undertake studies of the effects of liberalizing the rules governing certain contractions, as set out in paragraph 19 of my original paper. It was stressed that these studies should take account of the impact of such changes on teaching, learning, reading and writing. The need for more international members of the board was again emphasized.
6. CONCLUSION. Besides seeking responses to both of my papers, I would welcome any original suggestions which members of Committee III may have. Are there any new contractions or additional deletions which they want to recommend, or any further areas of study which they would like the Braille Research Centre to undertake? It is clear from opinions expressed at the Sacramento debate in March 1993 that changes to the contraction system should be kept to a minimum and individually justifiable.