Unified English Braille
Unified English Braille is designed to be readily understood by people familiar with the literary braille (used in standard prose writing), while also including support for specialized math and science symbols, computer-related symbols (the @ sign[1] as well as more specialised programming-language syntax), foreign alphabets, and visual effects (bullets, bold type, accent marks, and so on).the various national variants of ASCII in the ISO 8859 series versus the modern pan-universal Unicode standard, which governs how writing systems are encoded for computerized use).[15] The major criticism against UEB is that it fails to handle mathematics or computer science as compactly as codes designed to be optimal for those disciplines.However, although the Nemeth encoding standard was officially adopted by the JUTC of the US and the UK in the 1950s, in practice only the USA switched their mathematical braille to the Nemeth system, whereas the UK continued to use the traditional Henry Martyn Taylor coding (not to be confused with Hudson Taylor, who was involved with the use of Moon type for the blind in China during the 1800s) for their braille mathematics.However, after trying the system out in the classroom, the dashes used in the numerals—as well as several other rows of special characters—were found to be too difficult to distinguish from dot-pairs, and thus the typical digraph-based numerals became the official standard in 1837.Many of these countries use non-UEB math notation, for English-speaking countries specifically, versions of the Nemeth Code were widespread by 1990 (in the United States, Western Samoa, Canada including Quebec, New Zealand, Israel, Greece, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Lebanon) in contrast to the similar-to-UEB-but-not-identical Taylor notation in 1990 (used by the UK, Ireland, Australia, Nigeria, Hong Kong, Jordan, Kenya, Sierra Leone, Singapore, and Zimbabwe).Furthermore, other technologies that compete with braille are now ever-more-widely affordable (screen readers for electronic-text-to-speech, plus physical-pages-to-electronic-text software combined with high-resolution digital cameras and high-speed document scanners, and the increasing ubiquity of tablets/smartphones/PDAs/PCs).