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The universality in the use of British braille implied in Mr. Stone's letter was not as significant as it sounds. There were probably less than five hundred braille readers in all of India and the combined reading blind populations of New Zealand, Australia, South Africa and a small section of Canada using British braille was probably not greater than the reading blind population of New York and Pennsylvania. Furthermore, about all that was common in braille between Great Britain and the European countries he refers to was the alphabet, and Standard Dot utilized the British braille alphabet.

Two days later (December 17, 1915) Mr. Stone wrote a personal letter to Mr. Latimer which included the following paragraph: "I am so sorry that Standard Dot appears to us in this country impossible of acceptance. We don't doubt for a minute that it is a very good system, but then so is British braille, and why should we change to gain so little?"

In the United States, also, Standard Dot met with little enthusiasm. It was clear within a few months that without British participation the new code would never go into practical use. It was evident to the most optimistic of Standard Dot devotees that there was no hope of arriving at a uniform code based on anything but British Revised braille. Mr. Latimer, Secretary of the commission, wrote a letter dated January 8, 1916 to Mr. Henry Stainsby of Great Britain reporting on a recent meeting of the Commission on Uniform Type. In this letter he stated that it was the unanimous opinion of the commission that cooperation with Great Britain as to securing one uniform type for the blind of the English-speaking world was still the paramount aim of the commission. He also stated that the commission would like to know, should the Americans undertake the adoption of the British braille system as the uniform type of the English-speaking world, would the British official representatives be willing to undertake the improvement of the British braille system in so far as contractions, capitalizations, etc., were concerned?

He reported that the commission had appointed a subcommittee consisting of Messrs. Olin H. Burritt, M. C. Migel and H. R. Latimer to take this matter up at once with Great Britain and suggested that the British appoint a similar committee that would be thoroughly representative and official.

The British took steps immediately to set up a corresponding committee. At the request of the British committee the commission proposed certain changes in the British braille system which in its opinion would not cause too much confusion to those already using the recently Revised British braille but which would make it much more palatable to the American students of the subject.

The American educators objected especially to certain abbreviations and contractions, upon the theory that it would make blind finger-readers poor spellers when they came to writing on the typewriter. The Americans also felt that the large number of contractions and abbreviations would be too difficult for many blind people to master.

The American subcommittee suggested that the customary rules for capitalization in inkprint be observed instead of disregarding capitalization altogether, as was the custom in British braille books. To Americans it seemed probable that British publishers would not have fallen into the practice of omitting capitalization entirely if it had not been for the fact that the two-dot capital sign in British braille was so obtrusive as radically to alter the word form. The committee also recommended that a few contractions having a very low frequency of recurrence, and many which had been demonstrated by the Uniform Type Committee's tests as having a low degree of legibility, be deleted from the Revised braille code. Among the former were such characters as the sign for "Christ," "Lord," "unto," etc., which were obviously designed to take care of words recurring with great frequency in religious literature; and among the latter were such characters as those for "still," "child," "enough," etc. The committee further recommended that fourteen others which effected a space saving of less than two hundredths of one per cent be omitted as imposing a burden on new learners out of proportion to their space saving value, and that Roman numerals be followed by a period instead of an apostrophe.

Receiving no immediate reply from the British committee the American Commission on Uniform Type decided to cover itself by obtaining some additional authority from the American Association of Instructors of the Blind at its convention which met in Halifax in June, 1916. The commission recommended that that association adopt Revised Braille grades 1 and 2 as authorized in Great Britain, provided however, that the duly authorized English committee come to a full agreement with the American Commission on Uniform Type for the Blind concerning such modifications in Revised braille as had been proposed by the American commission or as might be proposed by either the American commission or the English committee.