Unified English Braille Code

Unified English Braille Code (UEBC) is an English Braille code developed to permit representing the wide variety of literary and technical material in use in the English-speaking world today. It was originally known as Unified Braille Code (UBC) with the English-specific nature being implied, but more recently the word "English" was formally incorporated into its name. Standard 6-dot braille only providing 63 distinct characters (not including the space character), a number of distinct rule sets have been developed over the years to represent literary text, mathematics and science, computer software, and other varieties of written material. As a result, braille users who desire to read or write a large range of material have needed to learn different sets of rules depending on what kind of material they were reading at a given time. Rules were often not compatible from one system to the next so that the reader would need to be notified as the text in a book moved from computer braille code to Nemeth Code, to standard literary braille. Unified English Braille Code is intended to develop one set of rules that can be applied across various types of material. The notable exception to this unification is Music Braille which UEBC specifically does not encompass. Unified English Braille Code is designed to be readily understood by people familiar with the literary braille used in standard prose writing while including support for specialized math and science symbols, foreign alphabets, and visual effects such as bullets, bold type, accent marks, and so on.

On April 3, 2004 the International Council on English Braille (ICEB) gave the go-ahead for the unification of various English braille codes. This decision was reached following 13 years of analysis, research and debate. ICEB said that Unified English Braille Code was sufficiently complete for recognition as an international standard for English-language braille that ICEB member countries could consider for adoption as their national code.

So far, adoption has been slow, with only a very few countries moving toward implementation of the new code. The major criticism against the code is that it fails to handle mathematics or Computer Braille in a compact manner.