Australian English Braille Translator (pre-Unified)  

FUNCTIONAL SUMMARY

The English/Australian tables support print-to-braille translation of English-language literary text, math and science, and computer notation, following the codes and customs of Australia. These are essentially the same as in Great Britain, except that the code used for computer notation is similar to that used in North America.

REFERENCES, HISTORY AND CREDITS

(The British and Australian tables were the same until late 2001, hence the parallel history.)

These tables are based primarily upon the definitive manual for British literary braille usage, namely "British Braille --- A Restatement of Standard English Braille," a publication of the Braille Authority of the United Kingdom (BAUK). The mathematics portions are based upon "Braille Mathematics Notation" (1989), also a BAUK publication.

The literary portions of the tables were developed in May 1978, by adapting the then-current version of the English/American tables. The work was done by Duxbury Systems, Inc., with feedback from the Royal Institute for Deaf and Blind Children, Sydney, Australia (then the Royal New South Wales Institute for Deaf and Blind Children), who were the first users of DBT to produce braille according to British practice.

Support for the American Computer Braille Code (CBC), as specified in "Code for Computer Braille Notation" (1987), a publication of the Braille Authority of North America (BANA), was added in March 1988, at the same time that it was added to the American tables. That code has subsequently come into common use for representing computer notation in some countries that otherwise mostly follow British codes, such as Australia.

Support for the British math code was developed in 1999 and added to the released DBT in late 2000.

English/Australian tables were split from the British tables, because the latter were updated to support British Braille Computer Notation (BCN), replacing the support for CBC.

(Documentation reviewed: May 2006.)

Duxbury DBT: Braille Translation in Many Languages.