You should see the lift buttons in the building our department is in. I don't think there's a single one across all four lifts that isn't damaged or bogus.

Braille characters take up a LOT of space! Grade 2, or contracted, UEB (Unified English Braille) takes up significantly less space than Grade 1, or simple, UEB. When you can combine multiple letters or even whole words into the space of one character or two, you can fit a whole lot more! The spacing is so rigid on braille characters, and all of them are the exact same size, unlike the letters in English, where letters are many different sizes and can be crammed next to each other.

I'm also a bit confused—at least in UEB, there's no such thing as contracted Grade 1 or really Grade 3.

Grade 1 is uncontracted, where every letter is spelled out.

Grade 2 is complex, and a space-saver, with multiple characters and whole words being condensed into a few characters.

Grade 3 is not an official kind of UEB, but usually it means somebody's shorthand. That might mean they've chosen certain characters to represent common words or letters, but this is non-standardized and would only make sense to themselves or others who they have told. It doesn't really exist in the beautiful, relatively modern, standardized world of UEB.

The worst signs I've seen are the ones that say "ADA SIGN DEPOT" or something similar on them.

It should be more common-place for public areas to use Grade 1, as it is easier to read. I know Grade 1 and in the process of learning Grade 2. Grade 2 is more contractions/abbreviations (dot 5 contractions, low E for en, dots 1, 2, 4, 5, 6 for er, stuff like that). I believe Grade 3 is more abbreviations (after is af, about is ab etc) but someone can correct me if I'm wrong because those abbreviations just got condensed into Grade 2 for me. Anyway, the reason why there's different contractions and abbreviations under different grades is because it makes it easier to read and it indicates there's difficult levels of difficulty.

If you were to write “can not”, you use 7 characters. If you abbreviate to “can’t” you have 5. If you say that we talk about usually talk about “negation” and not “tilt”, we can drop the apostrophe and now we are at four. If we say that we use “can” so much, we can just abbreviate it as “c”. In Grade1 Braille, it would be spelled C-A-N-space-N-O-T. In grade 2 it would be “CN” although “cannot” (because it is so common) actually has a special contraction that is easier to type and read.

From 7 characters down to 2. This matters a lot because you cannot change the size of the cell in braille (You can change the size of print and it is still legible to someone with good vision). Even with these sorts of tricks to compress data, braille takes enormous amounts of space and expensive paper compared to print.

As a good practical example - let’s take the Bible, assume it 1000 pages in print. You can get tiny print versions that literally fit in a pocket. A normal print version might be two inches (5cm) thick, a low vision version three inches (8cm) thick…. And a braille version, even with contractions, is a full dedicated floor-to-ceiling bookshelf - roughly 200 inches (5m) of heavy expensive paper.

Without contractions, it would be multiple bookshelves…. for one book.