The Science Access Project has been active in promoting improvements in Braille and in developing the new DotsPlus paradigm for representing more general text and graphics. It has also developed a few computer programs specifically aimed at tactile access. These include an addition to a freeware UNIX utility that permits braille access to most UNIX applications and the Boxer utility for making braille diagrams. Descriptions of both applications are linked from the Table of contents.
Braille is a method of representing words by dot patterns that can be read tactually. Standard English Braille has symbols for lower case letters, common punctuation marks, a capitalization indicator, italic indicators, and very little else. There are no braille symbols for a plus or equals sign for example.
Fewer than 15% of Americans who are legally blind can read braille, and very few braille readers can read the special braille codes presently required to represent math, science, computer programs, etc.
The Braille authorities of English-speaking countries have begun an effort to develop a better, more useful braille. A new proposal is currently under study. The unified braille code (ubc) is an idea whose time is long overdue. The current proposal would extend braille to include much current literature and would certainly greatly simplify the lives of young blind students learning simple math and science. Unfortunately the ubc in its present form is very clumsy and probably not even usable for many advanced scientific or computer topics.
Prof. John Gardner, director of SAP, and Prof. Norberto Salinas of the University of Kansas Math Department, have collaborated to develop a broader more flexible unified braille representation capable of reproducing essentially any kind of literature). Standard literature written in their GS code is very similar both to Standard English Braille and to the currently-proposed unified braille code. The GS font that is the basis of the code is a braille option used with the TRIANGLE computer application recently introduced by the Science Access project.
DotsPlus is a tactile "font set" developed by the SAP to permit straightforward tactile hard-copy representation with the same format used in print. DotsPlus letters are standard braille. DotsPlus punctuation marks are graphic symbols that feel like literary braille punctuation, so standard text in DotsPlus reads like grade 1 (uncontracted braille. Most of the less common symbols (e.g. plus sign, equals, times sign, parentheses, integral sign, fraction bar, absolute value bar) are represented by tactile images with the same shape as the print symbol.
DotsPlus has been praised by an evaluation panel of blind scientists and educators and was popular with several students for whom DotsPlus books on complex technical topics were printed. Unfortunately it has been difficult and expensive to produce DotsPlus materials, so the SAP developed the TIGER (TactIle Graphics EmbosseR) to make printing DotsPlus and virtually anything else easy. A major test of DotsPlus using TIGER has been proposed and, if funded, will begin later in 1998.