This site mourns the untimely passing on June 22, 2009 of our dear friend and colleague, Professor Eitan Gurari of Ohio State University. Dr. Gurari was an unusually kind and generous person who cared deeply about the current high cost and long turnaround times required to produce quality braille transcriptions. He had spent many years developing software to reduce this high cost and to make existing electronic technical documents instantaneously available in Nemeth braille.
At the time of his death, Dr. Gurari had been scheduled to make a presentation at TUG 2009 about his forthcoming, free, open source print-to-braille transcribing system which could handle both EBAE and Nemeth. Here is the abstract he had submitted:
SuBrl: A LaTeX to braille converter: A first look at a forthcoming system
SuBrl is a system under development for translating LaTeX and XML data into braille. The presentation will demonstrate the translation of LaTeX and XML into braille, describe the architecture of the system, discuss issues that require special attention in LaTeX and XML sources, and argue the benefit of a LaTeX front end for braille production.
This new system utilizes Dr. Gurari's world-famous tex4ht application for accurate conversion of documents encoded in any flavor of TeX or LaTeX to HTML/MathML and incorporates numerous specialized capabilities needed for print-to-braille conversion.
Persons interested in contributing technical resources to the realization of Dr. Gurari's goals for braille transcription may contact info AT dotlessbraille.org for information.
Demystifying braille...
www.dotlessbraille.org is a non-commercial and commercial-free
website dedicated to demystifying braille, to presenting new ideas
for learning and presenting braille, and to advertising the need for open source developers to contribute to the development of free and open source braille software.
One goal of this website is to increase braille literacy by demystifying braille without oversimplifying it.
A second goal is to interest volunteers in developing free and open source software that supports braille literacy. If you are interested, please watch for the highlighted areas and/or contact us directly.
This site is intended as braille resource for everyone from novice to expert, including print-disabled adults who are looking for a way to start learning about braille. The material here has been written by a sighted person; it is hoped that this perspective of a dot-challenged person will give braille-literate blind persons some useful insights into the difficulties that sighted persons encounter in learning braille.
Braille codes are systems for transcribing printed material to the dot-based symbols, known as braille cells, which are designed for tactile reading. Our philosophy is that it can often be simpler and faster to learn about the elegant braille systems before getting involved with the braille cells.
One of our new ideas is the DotlessBraille display method for braille transcriptions that is illustrated by this interlining sample which could be used in a children's book and by these screen captures. Our hope is that by altering print to represent braille in an equivalent but meaningful way we can reduce any tendency on the part of sighted persons to want to alter braille merely for our own convenience. Sighted proofreading of DotlessBraille transcriptions could also ease the current shortage of braille proofreaders which is especially serious in technical areas.
If you have feedback, questions or would like to volunteer, please write to us at
info AT dotlessbraille.org. Also, please let us
know of any accessibility problems with these pages.
This page was last updated July 6, 2009.