From: Marco Cimarosti (marco.cimarosti@essetre.it)
Date: Tue Apr 12 2005 - 05:54:45 CST
Dean Snyder wrote:
> [...]
> Two questions:
> [...]
Sorry, I don't know anything about your first question. I suggest you
investigate how braille web browsers work: they must have a way or another
to transcribe unrecognized Unicode characters, and spelling out the code
point value sounds like a reasonable default behavior.
Your might be interested in LIBBRAILE, a free software library to support
braille devices in a variety of platforms and for several different
languages. It now also has experimental Unicode support:
> 2) Other than speech synthesis, how do blind CJK computer
> users interact with text on their computers?
In braille, of course...
Chinese braille is phonetic (so, no ideographs!); there are at least two
kinds of Chinese braille: Mandarin and Cantonese. Both system are derived
from Bopomofo (http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U3100.pdf) and are work
similarly to it, in that they use three cells to represent each syllable:
the first one represents the initial consonant, the second one the "rhyme"
(vowel + final consonant, if any), and the third one the tone.
Also Japanese braille is phonetic, and uses cells to represents kana letters
(so, no kanji, and no differentiation between hiragana and katakana). Three
dots in each cell encode the consonant in each kana, while the remaining
three dots represents the vowel. As three dots can represent up to 8
combinations, and Japanese only has 5 vowels, there is plenty room for
punctuation and other symbols.
In Korean, braille cells represent of course Hangul letters: there are
separate cells for the three sign classes of Hangul letters: choseong
(initial consonants), jungseong (vowels & diphthongs), and jongseong (final
consonants).
-- Marco
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Tue Apr 12 2005 - 05:56:32 CST