IPA Braille

Developed by Dr. Robert Englebretson in conjunction with the International Council on English Braille.

The comment period on IPA Braille has now ended, and the final document has been published by CNIB (Canadian National Institute for the Blind) in April, 2008. The IPA Braille publication is available for free download at http://www.iceb.org/icebipa.htm. If you do not have a braille embosser and equipment to print the tactile images, you may also order a hardcopy from the Braille Institute of America (ordering information given at the above site). If you have any questions related to the IPA and braille, please feel free to contact me at reng {at} rice.edu.

This section contains links to other resources related to braille, IPA, and accessibility for blind students and professionals in linguistics, along with software and fonts relevant to this project. Please e-mail me with suggestions to add to this list.

IPA, Linguistics, Braille, and Accessibility

• Instructions and JAWS character maps (by Robert Englebretson) explain how to enable the JAWS For Windows screen reader to read Unicode IPA characters.
• Dr. Sheri Wells-Jensen's home page contains lots of interesting links, including many relevant to braille and linguistics.
• Claude Chaunier's IPA page provides a basic overview of both print and (considerably out-of-date) braille IPA, but the author describes the site as a "Work in no progress!"

Relevant Software and Fonts

• The Doulos SIL Font is a Unicode font which is (in my opinion) the best font to use for IPA characters. It is fully Unicode compliant, works on both PC and Mac, and costs nothing to download and use. This font provides a full IPA Unicode character set, something which the Unicode fonts otherwise generally available in Windows do not have.
• An easy and completely accessible way to insert phonetic symbols into a Word document is to use Uniqoder written by Östen Dahl, and recently updated by Hans-Jörg Bibiko. This is a template for Microsoft Word which provides extra menus, toolbars, and macros for inputting phonetic symbols. Kudos to Östen Dahl for designing this extremely useful tool which also happens to be completely accessible for blind users using Jaws or other screen readers!
• My other favorite way of typing IPA is using the IPA Unicode 1.0.4 Keyman Keyboard from SIL. Documentation is included in the download. To use this keyboard layout, you will also need to purchase and install Tavultesoft Keyman from Tavultesoft. These products are completely accessible using Jaws or other screen readers.
• For people who don't want to learn new keyboard layouts, or who simply want a quick and easy way of pasting Unicode IPA characters into a document, the IPA character picker is another useful means of input. (In order for this to work with a screen reader, make sure you have all of the symbols defined in a character dictionary as described here for Jaws.)
• The SimBraille font, which simulates braille dots on the screen for sighted users, can be obtained directly from the Duxbury Systems Braille font download link

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