Participation in a digitally united Europe: The Detailed Extendible Tactile Alphabet Identification List (DETAIL)
Natural persons and legal entities have the right to have their names or abbreviations correctly reproduced in documents throughout the EU. Until now, for example, citizens of other EU member states in Germany have had to live with the fact that often only the basic letters, but not accent marks or other additions, were printed or digitally rendered on identity cards or in other documents. According to EU requirements, this is to change: The authorities of the EU member states are obliged to take these linguistic features into account.

As part of implementation of the new requirements, a list of all relevant alphabetic characters was created in Germany under the name String.Latin+ 1.2. This, in turn, served as the basis for the standard DIN 91379.

To meet the requirements for digital accessibility, it must be ensured that the applications and documents in question are accessible to all user groups. With the appropriate technology, everyone must be able to read the applications and documents encoded in this way. Therefore, people who work with a braille display must also be able to recognize whether they are reading a c with a caron or a cedilla (č or ç) – and not just a c with an unspecified addition.

The Braille Authority of the German-speaking Countries (BSKDL) therefore commissioned an internal working group to develop a proposal for the implementation of String.Latin+ on braille displays, i.e. in 8-dot computer braille. The aim was to ensure that the relevant Unicode characters are unambiguously represented, if necessary using pre- or post-positioned braille characters. This work has now come to fruition.

The result is the Detailed Extendable Tactile Alphabet Identification List (DETAIL). This makes it possible for the basic letter and additional features such as diacritics to be clearly recognizable on the braille display. The characteristics of 8-point braille made it necessary, for example, for diacritics to consist of a total of three cells, i.e. three dot combinations: the basic letter (e.g. c), the feature type represented (e.g. that it is a c with a diacritical letter) and the diacritic itself (e.g. cedille). For reasons of better readability when used in the German-speaking countries, the encoding of the German umlauts and some other characters is not consistent with this system. The character table DETAIL clearly shows a German computer braille bias.

The working group took the opportunity to look beyond Latin character sets. It also allows the unambiguous identification of letters of other alphabets (e.g. Cyrillic) as well as various symbols.

The aim of table is only to allow the unambiguous identification of characters in, for instance, text that is likely to contain numerous place, personal or other proper names or foreign language passages, and only as far as it is necessary to identify the characters exactly. In contrast, it would be tedious or difficult to use 'DETAIL' to read text that is entirely written in a foreign language with many diacritics or even in another alphabet, e.g. in Cyrillic or Hebrew script – even though the letters would be clearly recognizable. By using 'DETAIL', braille display users familiar with the character set can clearly identify all letters of different writing systems present in documents at any time. Manufacturers of assistive devices should be able to offer the character set as an additional, optional method for the unambiguous reproduction of such texts. DETAIL is currently available as a character set for installation under JAWS for Windows and NVDA.

Braille Authority of the German-speaking Countries, May 2023