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English Braille Wikipedia

[edit]
submitted verification final decision
This proposal has been rejected.
This decision was taken by the language committee in accordance with the Language proposal policy based on the discussion on this page.

The closing committee member provided the following comment:

Should be solved as a writing system inside of English Wikipedia. --Millosh (talk) 06:12, 29 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Proposal summary
  • Language details: English
  • Editing community: {{{community}}}
    List your user name if you're interested in editing the wiki. Add "N" next to your
    name if you are a native speaker of this language.
  • Relevant pages: {{{links}}}
  • External links:
    {{{external}}}
Localization
  • Project name: Wikipedia
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    in French.
  • Project namespace: Wikipedia
    The name of the namespace for project pages like policies; usually the same
    as the project name.
  • Project_talk namespace: Wikipedia discussion
    The name of the discussion namespace for project pages like policies; for
    example, "Wikipedia talk" in English.
  • Wiki logo: {{{logo}}}
    The name of the wiki logo uploaded to the Wikimedia Commons, like
    "Wikipedia-logo-v2-pl.png" (see logo).
  • Default timezone: UTC
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    default UTC.
  • User interface: See Translatewiki.
Please read the handbook for requesters for help using this template correctly.

I would like to propose a Wikipedia for English w:Braille, with articles written in w:Braille ASCII, and a total ban on images and any kind of non-ASCII w:Unicode symbols. Even Braille Unicode patterns should not be used, because they are rarely rendered on actual Braille displays which usually display only Braille ASCII.

Although many articles in English Wikipedia are perfectly accessible on Braille displays, some are not. In particular, the use of w:Unicode symbols often causes problems for Braille displays, and for some less-capable speech synthesizers. Ironically, the Wikipedia articles about the various forms of Braille itself are inaccessible in this way because they frequently use Braille Unicode patterns to illustrate their examples.

At the very least, it would be nice to put versions of the Braille articles (w:Chinese Braille, w:Japanese Braille etc) that use ASCII braille instead of Unicode symbols. I expect other articles could benefit from having Braille-optimized versions too.

Additionally, w:Grade 2 braille written by hand is better than Grade 2 braille generated by machine. For example, consider this word: chemotherapy. An automatic Braille generator might notice that this contains "mother", and construct it as che + mother + apy, which is totally unclear (someone writing Grade 2 braille manually would not construct the word in this way). Granted, many Braille generators nowadays don't fall down on that particular example, but there are others. Much the same rationale behind having audio recordings of Wikipedia articles instead of relying on speech synthesis, can also be applied to having Braille versions instead of relying on automatic conversion.

Arguments in favour

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  • It would provide an outlet for Braille-optimized versions of articles

Arguments against

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  • Articles on Braille Wikipedia might get less peer review than articles on print Wikipedia
  • Synchronizing the two Wikipedias might get behind (but this is always an issue with separate-language editions, audio recordings, etc)

Other discussion

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Requester should probably ask braille machine manufacturers to make their product compatible with unicode instead.C933103 (talk) 23:35, 11 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

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