an unvarying identity-relationship, and new symbols possible without conflicts or overhauls 8. philosophically, an additional goal is to upgrade the braille system to be practical for employment in a workplace, not just for reading recreational and religious texts a. computer-friendly (braille-production on modern keyboards and braille-consumption via computerized file formats—see also Braille e-book which did not really exist back in 1990) b. tech-writing-friendly (straightforward handling of notations used in math/science/medical/programming/engineering/similar) c. precise bidirectional representation (both #8a and #8b can be largely satisfied by a precision writing system…but the existing braille systems as of 1990 were not fully precise, replacing symbols with words, converting unit-systems, altering punctuation, and so on) 9. upgrades to existing braille-codes are required, and then these modified codes can be merged into a unified code (preferably singular plus the music-code) Some goals were specially and explicitly called out as key objectives, not all of which are mentioned above: objective#A = precise bidirectional representation of printed-text (see #8c) objective#B = maximizing the usefulness of braille's limited formatting mechanisms in systematic fashion (so that readers can quickly and easily locate the information they are seeking) objective#C = unifying the rule-systems and symbol-assignments for all subject-matters except musical notation, to eliminate 'unlearning' (#9 / #2 / #3) objective#D = context-independent encoding (symbols must be transcribable in straightforward fashion—without regard to their English meaning) objective#E = markup or mode-switching ability (to clearly distinguish between information from the printed version, versus transcriber commentary) objective#F = easy-to-memorize symbol-assignments (to make learning the coding system easier—and also facilitate reading of relatively rare symbols) (see #7c / #5 / #1) objective#G = extensible coding-system (with the possibility of introducing new symbols in a non-conflicting and systematic manner) (see #7d) objective#H = algorithmic representation and deterministic rule-set (texts are amenable to automatic computerized translation from braille to print—and vice versa) (see #8a) objective#I = backward compatibility with English Braille Grade 2 (someone reading regular words and sentences will hardly notice any modifications) objective#J = reverse the steadily declining trend of braille-usage (as a statistical percentage of the blind-community), as soon as possible (see #6) Goals that were specifically not part of the UEB upgrade process were the ability to handle languages outside the Roman alphabet (cf. the various national variants of ASCII in the ISO 8859 series versus the modern pan-universal Unicode standard, which governs how writing systems are encoded for computerized use). History of specification