IDNA Comparisons

[John C Klensin]

--On Friday, July 17, 2009 08:39 -0700 Gervase Markham
<gerv at mozilla.org> wrote:

>...
> Checking the Wikipedia entry on Braille seems to support my 
> understanding. But perhaps, if there is still doubt, asking a
> Braille  user might be more fruitful than further speculation.

As implied by my prior note, I've asked.  I've asked several
and, over the years, worked with several, including some whose
preferred form of computer output involved text-to-Braille
converters attached to either Braille writers/embossers or
tactile devices that presented Braille a line at a time.  That
preference seems to be getting less common these days, with the
more common preference being screen scrapers and text-to-speech
programs for the completely blind and a combination of them and
high-powered screen magnifiers for the partially sighted, but it
is still a preference with some.  The screen scraper folks are
either not relevant to this discussion or make the "Braille is
just an alternate presentation form" argument even more
important because (i) no one I've talked with is aware of a
Braille-to-speech program capability, even though it wouldn't be
especially hard to build one and (ii) reading Braille
differently from how the text is read would create serious
confusion.

Again, none of those folks would claim to speak for the broader
community, but we have asked, we have consulted relevant
references, and your conclusion seems to be the correct one.

Various sign and pictographic languages are an entirely
different matter.

    john