International Council on English Braille (ICEB)
Unified English Braille Project

CURRENT UEB SYMBOL LISTS
As of: September 22, 2009

This document presents the basic symbols of UEB as defined by adopted motions of the UEB Committee to date.

In these lists, the order is the customary one for braille characters, i.e. as the characters would be read in the standard seven-line table.

In the braille edition of these lists, each entry may begin with a two-cell "dot locator", dots 46, 123456, which is there to assure that the position of the dots is always clear when read in real braille; it is not part of the symbol being listed.

Sighted readers who do not see a pattern in simulated braille at the beginning of each line should download and install the "SimBraille" font from the free downloads page of Duxbury Systems' web site at http://www.duxburysystems.com. If your browser can make use of such fonts, you should then see the simulated braille properly.

Persons who are reading this list in real braille need to be sure that their viewing device is set for "North American ASCII-Braille"; if some other device code is in effect, some of the braille characters will be incorrect.

LIST 1: SYMBOLS USED IN GRADE 1 AND NUMERIC MODES, INCLUDING VERTICAL AND DIAGONAL LINE SEGMENTS, AND ASSIGNED SHAPES; AND GRADE 2 CONTRACTIONS

This list presents the basic symbols of UEB for grade 1 and numeric mode, including vertical and diagonal line segments, and all directly assigned shape symbols. Valid single-cell UEB symbols that have no grade 1 assignment are also included, and noted as not assigned. Any symbol listed here may also be used freely in grade 2 when that symbol has no grade 2 definition or the context does not allow for its interpretation as a grade 2 symbol (contraction). Grade 2 contractions are also listed.

Symbols defined and used only within "arrow mode" and "horizontal line mode" are listed separately below (see lists 2 and 3). Note also that only specifically assigned shapes are listed here, whereas made-up shape descriptions are permitted as described in section 3.19 of the final (January 2004) report of Committee 2 of the original UEB Research Project, "The Reader Rules"

The symbols list itself is at UEBSYMB (maintained using "Google Docs" for convenience). Notes on the list contents are given below.

a. The "Order" column is a code to facilitate keeping the list in braille order.

b. "n/e" in the print and Unicode columns means that there appears to be no equivalent corresponding Unicode character at the time this is written. "n/a" means that Unicode correspondence is not applicable; this is typical of braille indicators.

c. The appearance of the characters in the "print" column will depend on the font in use, and some fonts do not support all Unicode characters. For definitive information about the normal form of the character corresponding to a given Unicode value, see the code pages at http://www.unicode.org.

d. The correspondence listed for each symbol is based primarily upon the normal print form of that symbol as considered by the assigning committee, and secondarily upon its "meaning" as so considered, and consequently the meaning or name listed may or may not agree with the name given in a Unicode listing. In general, especially for technical symbols, meanings and usages can vary widely from one work to the next.

e. Also, because of redundancy in Unicode, it should not be assumed that the value given is necessarily the only suitable one. For example, the "dot multiplication" symbol, listed as corresponding to Unicode 22c5 ("dot operator"), corresponds just as well to 00b7 ("middle dot"). Similarities such as this can be found by examining the information associated with each code on the Unicode web site mentioned above.

f. The "Status" column is blank for accepted symbols. Otherwise it contains "proposed" or other status information.

g. In the "Description" column, relevant section numbers in "The Reader Rules," and/or a date for the symbol adoption, are given in square brackets.

Footnotes to the List

1. In the 1995 UEB Research Committee 2 report, the broken vertical bar is identified as the ASCII vertical bar code or "pipe" while the solid vertical bar is listed as a separate character and specifically "not the ASCII code". However, it has subsequently become clear, both in ASCII listings and in Unicode listings where codes 0000-007f correspond to ASCII, and despite appearances on many if not most keyboards to this day, that it is the solid vertical bar that is properly the ASCII symbol or "pipe" while the broken vertical bar is distinct. See http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/latin1/ascii-hist.html for information on the history of this character's inclusion in ASCII.

2. In the 1995 UEB Research Committee 2 report, the common trademark symbol was described as a circled "TM"; however, in general current usage, it appears as in the Unicode list, i.e. in the superscript position but not encircled.

3. Filled and solid assigned shapes are formed in the same way as the regular shapes, substituting the appropriate indicator.

4. Alignment mode was described in the UEB Research Committee II Supplementary Report of October 1999; it was removed from UEB by a later decision.

LIST 2: SYMBOLS USED IN ARROW MODE

The following table lists symbols having a special interpretation within arrow mode (see The Reader Rules section 3.12). These interpretations apply only within that mode.

LIST 3: SYMBOLS USED IN HORIZONTAL LINE MODE

The following table lists symbols having a special interpretation within horizontal line mode (see The Reader Rules section 3.26). (Note that the rules for horizontal line mode allow an arrow indicator [dots 1256] to commence an arrow within the line, and also allow for arbitrary symbols, beyond those listed here and other than the arrow indicator, to be used.) These interpretations apply only within horizontal line mode. Note that symbols used for vertical and diagonal line segments appear within the main symbol list (see list 1 above).