BA/5/02
Notes from the meeting held on 17th October 2002 at RNIB, Judd Street, London, to discuss the publication of the new edition of British Braille.
[Note that the following deals only with the substantial points, and are not full minutes.]
Present: Bill Poole, Allan Young, Iain Millard, David McKerral, Lisa Bhogal, Barbara Leighton, Clare Gailans, David Boden, Gail Chester, Hans Cohn, Stephen Phippen.
Apologies: Winnie Morrell, Nigel Berry, Fred Jakeman, Peter Wilkins, Richard West, Gareth Davies.
A. The following decisions relate to the points raised in the document "British Braille: Some comments from Stephen Phippen", (included separately). Numbers refer to the paragraph numbers in that document:
1. It was agreed that this matter should be referred to a joint technical committee meeting to be set up covering the mathematics, science and computer codes. For maths it was felt that the closeness between the literary and maths codes was an important consideration, although it was accepted that a balance had to be struck between this consideration and that of compactness. For computer code it was felt that the sign should not be changed.
2. It was agreed that the situation, although not ideal, was acceptable; there is no easy remedy.
3. BB 5.2.5 should be amended to state generally that adjacent headings of different rank should be capitalised separately, then this will cover the most common cases of adjacent numbered headings. Sequences of numbered capitalised paragraphs will also need to be capitalised separately because of the presence of the numbers, but this is a fairly rare occurrence.
4. The headings "Contents", "Section" and "Page" should have initial capitals in the contents in the braille version.
5. Refer to the joint technical committee.
6. Refer to the joint technical committee. (The opinion of the meeting was to agree with the view taken in the paper.)
7. Refer to the joint technical committee. (The opinion of the meeting was to agree with the view taken in the paper.)
8. Refer to the joint technical committee. (The opinion of the meeting was to agree with the view taken in the paper.)
B. Other technical points:
1. The method of brailling electronic addresses in literary code explained in 5.3.6 will include cases with numbers. Examples should be included, plus supporting text explaining that a letter sign or capital sign is used to terminate the number when followed by letters in the string.
2. Simplify 8.5.7 to say that the "one" contraction can generally be used in "oney". Hence remove "honey" and "money" from the examples of exceptions.
3. Provide a complete contents in volume 1 (inserting headings to indicate the two sections of entries), but just give the contents to volume 2 in volume 2.
4. Where a word is divided, and the fragment on the new line begins with "be", "con", "dis" or "com", add the condition to BB 8.4.21 that the fragment on the new line must be a word of cognate meaning for those contractions to be used.
5. Add examples to BB 8.11.5 for Greek words containing the "sth" sequence.
6. There is possibly an error in the Hebrew alphabet listing - Hans Cohn will inform us if this is the case.
7. In the print document, the use of underlining to show contractions is less clear for the "gg" contraction (because of the descenders): this will be looked at to see if it can be improved.
8. The rule that words joined by the apostrophe are counted separately as regards italics if foreign, but as one if English, was questioned (5.5.13 and 5.5.14), but was justified as being the most natural treatment in each case, even though the need for two rules was not ideal.
9. It was agreed that it was not appropriate to include a statement in British Braille that when both capitalised and non-capitalised versions of a work are produced, the volume divisions should coincide.
C. Implementation issues:
The input to this part of the discussion came from a document received from RNIB: "Implementing the Braille Rule Changes in the New Edition of British Braille" (included separately). This was considered paragraph by paragraph, and the points made were generally thought to be reasonable. It was consequently decided to recommend that British Braille be published as soon as possible, e.g. at the beginning of 2003, with the statement that implementation would be expected a years hence (e.g. the beginning of 2004), although people would be free to implement before then if they were able to do so. The implementation date would be moveable if unforeseen circumstances emerged. We would need to be realistic and flexible in this matter.
It was agreed that a joint meeting should be set up with representatives from BAUK and UKABP to discuss the question of implementation further.
The meeting closed.