An examination of Unified English Braille and its efficiency in representing print

Abstract

This study considers whether Unified English Braille provides an efficient representation of printed English. Two databases of English words were used to acquire and calculate information about English orthography that was then used to analyze Unified English Braille (UEB) using a computer program developed by the second author. In general, braille groupsigns and wordsigns represent many of the most frequently occurring letter combinations and words in English. However, there were some braille contractions that are so infrequent, they appear fewer than 100 times per million words or did not appear in the database at all. There was good braille representation within the 50 most frequent words, and our efficiency index showed that braille is already extremely efficient, although there is some mismatch between the order of introduction for braille and the frequency of certain words and letter combinations in English. There is a common understanding that we should teach all of the contractions by the end of third grade, but our results show that some contractions, many of which are shortform words, never appear in school texts. It may be possible to approach instruction of shortform words in a different way.