BANA's November 2012 adoption of Unified English Braille did not replace Nemeth Code — the US still has no single mandated braille code for math and science

In November 2012, US members of the Braille Authority of North America (BANA) voted to adopt Unified English Braille (UEB), with implementation underway by January 2016. UEB was meant to unify literary and much technical braille under one code. It did not fully do so: Nemeth Code (for mathematics and science), Braille Music Code, and IPA notation remain official parallel codes. Per BANA's own terminology page, technical content today "can be transcribed in UEB or in Nemeth" — there is no single mandated braille code for math and science in the US, only a standing choice between two legitimate systems.

BANA's current stated position on that choice is a non-mandate: pick the code based on the individual reader's needs, rather than a top-down default — stated on BANA's own terminology page: "The decision to use UEB or the Nemeth Code within UEB context for technical materials should be made based on braille readers' individual needs" (verified against the primary page, 2026-07-12 audit). Whether current state-level instructional mandates split roughly along old regional or institutional lines is an open question, routed at question-verify-nemeth-ueb-state-mandates-split.

This is a live recurrence of the exact tension resolved, on paper, by the 1932 London Type Conference: see claim-war-of-the-dots-competing-braille-systems-1829-1932 for the 1829-1932 standards war, and claim-william-bell-wait-sighted-designer-of-new-york-point for the losing side of that first war.