RoboBraille

Last updated

RoboBraille is a web and email service capable of converting documents into a range of accessible formats including Braille, mp3, e-books and Daisy. The service can furthermore be used to convert otherwise inaccessible documents such as scanned images and pdf files into more accessible formats. RoboBraille has been in operation since 2004 and currently serves thousands of user requests each month from users across the world. The service is available for free for strictly individual, non-commercial use. Institutional use by academic institutions is available through SensusAccess.

Contents

The RoboBraille service is developed jointly by the National Danish Center for Visual Impairment for Children and Youth and Sensus ApS. RoboBraille is available free of charge for individual, non-commercial users and users need not register to use the service. Commercial use in any form is prohibited. The development and operation of RoboBraille has been funded by the Danish Government, the European Commission and private foundations. Many organisations have contributed to the development of the RoboBraille service including Royal National College for the Blind based in Hereford, United Kingdom, St Joseph's School for the Blind, Ireland, the National Council for the Blind of Ireland, Irish Republic, Associazione Nazionale Subvedenti, Italy, CIDEF, Portugal, Hilfsgemeinschaft der Blinden und Sehschwachen Österreichs, Austria, Medison, Poland, The Lithuanian Association of the Blind and Visually Handicapped, Lithuania, Association Valentin Haüy, France, and the Pancyprian Organization of the Blind, Cyprus.

In November 2012, the RoboBraille service received the WISE 2012 award from Qatar Foundation in recognition of its contribution to inclusive and barrier-free education. In January 2010, the RoboBraille services received the prestigious BETT Award. The service has previously received the BETT Award for best Special Education Needs solution (2010), Access IT Award for Learning for most affordable eLearning solution (2009), The National eWell-Being Award for ”Reaching the Digitally Excluded” (2009), the European Commission eInclusion Award for e-Accessibility Award (2008), the Well-Tech Award for Innovation and Accessibility (2008) and the British Computer Society's Social Contribution Award (2007).

RoboBraille offers four main categories of services:

  1. Braille services: Translation to and from Braille (contracted, un-contracted) in Bulgarian, Danish, British English, American English, Hungarian, Italian, French, Greek, German, Icelandic, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian and Spanish. Supported document types include text files (DOS and Windows), Microsoft Word documents (doc, docx, Word xml), HTML documents, rtf files, tiff, gif, jpg, bmp, pcx, dcx, j2k, jp2, jpx, djv and all types of pdf documents. Before the Braille document is returned to the user, it may be converted to a particular Braille character set based on user settings. Documents can also be returned in Unicode Braille or formatted in either text format or PEF (Portable Embosser Format).
  2. Audio services: All document types listed in the previous section may be converted into mp3 files. Furthermore, RoboBraille is capable of converting well-structured Word documents (doc, docx, xml) into Daisy Talking Books complete with audio. Similarly, RoboBraille can convert docx documents containing math (composed in MathType) into Daisy books with spoken math. The audio conversion services currently include high-quality voices for the following languages: Arabic, Arabic/English bilingual, Bulgarian, Danish, Dutch (male, female), English/American, English/British, French, German, Greenlandic, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Lithuanian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovenian Spanish/Castilian and Spanish/Latin American.
  3. E-Book services: Most document types listed above may be converted into the popular EPUB and Mobi Pocket (Amazon Kindle) e-book formats. The service also supports conversion of documents into the EPUB3 format, including EPUB3 books with media overlay. Furthermore, EPUB may be converted to Mobi Pocket and vice versa. To accommodate users with low vision, the base line of the body text in an e-book may be raised to allow for more appropriate text scaling in mainstream e-book readers.
  4. Accessibility services: Otherwise inaccessible documents such as image files in gif, tiff, jpg, bmp, pcx, dcx, j2k, jp2, jpx, djv and image-only pdf, as well as all types of pdf files can be converted to more accessible formats including tagged pdf, doc, docx, Word xml, xls, xlsx, csv, text, rtf and html. Word and rtf files are converted into text or tagged pdf files subject to the format specified by the user in the subject line, e.g., txt or pdf. PowerPoint files are converted into tagged pdf, web projects or rtf files.

In addition to the traditional email-interface, RoboBraille is available via the web form at http://www.robobraille.org/

History

RoboBraille was invented in 2004 by Lars Ballieu Christensen, a computer scientist and social entrepreneur and Svend Thougaard, an alternate media specialist. The system was developed in Denmark with the assistance of the Royal National College for the Blind based in Hereford, United Kingdom. [1] The system was launched in June 2006 and was the winner of a British Computer Society Social Contribution Project Award in 2007. [1]

Related Research Articles

LaTeX Document preparation system

LaTeX is a software system for document preparation. When writing, the writer uses plain text as opposed to the formatted text found in "What You See Is What You Get" word processors like Microsoft Word, LibreOffice Writer and Apple Pages. The writer uses markup tagging conventions to define the general structure of a document, to stylise text throughout a document, and to add citations and cross-references. A TeX distribution such as TeX Live or MiKTeX is used to produce an output file suitable for printing or digital distribution.

Microsoft Word Word processor developed by Microsoft

Microsoft Word is a word processor developed by Microsoft. It was first released on October 25, 1983, under the name Multi-Tool Word for Xenix systems. Subsequent versions were later written for several other platforms including IBM PCs running DOS (1983), Apple Macintosh running the Classic Mac OS (1985), AT&T UNIX PC (1985), Atari ST (1988), OS/2 (1989), Microsoft Windows (1989), SCO Unix (1994), and macOS (2001).

The Rich Text Format is a proprietary document file format with published specification developed by Microsoft Corporation from 1987 until 2008 for cross-platform document interchange with Microsoft products. Prior to 2008, Microsoft published updated specifications for RTF with major revisions of Microsoft Word and Office versions.

A document file format is a text or binary file format for storing documents on a storage media, especially for use by computers. There currently exist a multitude of incompatible document file formats.

TextMaker is a word processor developed by the Nuremberg (Germany) based software company SoftMaker and available as part of the SoftMaker office suite. Earlier versions were also sold separately.

Digital Accessible Information System Technical standard for digital audiobooks, periodicals and computerized text

Digital accessible information system (DAISY) is a technical standard for digital audiobooks, periodicals, and computerized text. DAISY is designed to be a complete audio substitute for print material and is specifically designed for use by people with "print disabilities", including blindness, impaired vision, and dyslexia. Based on the MP3 and XML formats, the DAISY format has advanced features in addition to those of a traditional audio book. Users can search, place bookmarks, precisely navigate line by line, and regulate the speaking speed without distortion. DAISY also provides aurally accessible tables, references, and additional information. As a result, DAISY allows visually impaired listeners to navigate something as complex as an encyclopedia or textbook, otherwise impossible using conventional audio recordings.

Microsoft Office 2007 Version of Microsoft Office

Microsoft Office 2007 is a version of Microsoft Office, a family of office suites and productivity software for Windows, developed and published by Microsoft. It was released to manufacturing on November 3, 2006; it was subsequently made available to volume license customers on November 30, 2006, and later to retail on January 30, 2007, the same respective release dates of Windows Vista. The ninth major release of Office for Windows, Office 2007 was preceded by Office 2003 and succeeded by Office 2010. The Mac OS X equivalent, Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac, was released on January 15, 2008.

Data conversion is the conversion of computer data from one format to another. Throughout a computer environment, data is encoded in a variety of ways. For example, computer hardware is built on the basis of certain standards, which requires that data contains, for example, parity bit checks. Similarly, the operating system is predicated on certain standards for data and file handling. Furthermore, each computer program handles data in a different manner. Whenever any one of these variables is changed, data must be converted in some way before it can be used by a different computer, operating system or program. Even different versions of these elements usually involve different data structures. For example, the changing of bits from one format to another, usually for the purpose of application interoperability or of capability of using new features, is merely a data conversion. Data conversions may be as simple as the conversion of a text file from one character encoding system to another; or more complex, such as the conversion of office file formats, or the conversion of image formats and audio file formats.

Atlantis Word Processor Stand-alone word processor for Microsoft Windows

Atlantis Word Processor is a stand-alone word processor for Microsoft Windows. It used to be known as "Atlantis Ocean Mind".

The following is a comparison of e-book formats used to create and publish e-books.

Microsoft Word Viewer

Microsoft Word Viewer is a discontinued freeware program for Microsoft Windows that can display and print Microsoft Word documents. Word Viewer allows text from a Word document to be copied into clipboard and pasted into a word processor. The last version was Word Viewer 2003 Service Pack 3 released in 2007.

Accessible publishing is an approach to publishing and book design whereby books and other texts are made available in alternative formats designed to aid or replace the reading process. Alternative formats that have been developed to aid different people to read include varieties of larger fonts, specialised fonts for certain kinds of reading disabilities, Braille, e-books, and automated Audiobooks and DAISY digital talking books.

EPUB E-book file format

EPUB is an e-book file format that uses the ".epub" file extension. The term is short for electronic publication and is sometimes styled ePub. EPUB is supported by many e-readers, and compatible software is available for most smartphones, tablets, and computers. EPUB is a technical standard published by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF). It became an official standard of the IDPF in September 2007, superseding the older Open eBook standard.

STDU Viewer

STDU Viewer is computer software, a compact viewer for many computer file formats: Portable Document Format (PDF), World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), DjVu, comic book archive, FB2, ePUB, XML Paper Specification (XPS), Text Compression for Reader (TCR), Mobipocket (MOBI), AZW, multi-page TIFF, text file (TXT), PalmDoc (PDB), Windows Metafile (EMF), Windows Metafile (WMF), bitmap (BMP), Graphics Interchange Format (GIF), JPEG-JPG, Portable Network Graphics (PNG), Photoshop Document (PSD), PiCture eXchang (PCX-DCX). It works under Microsoft Windows, and is free for non-commercial use.

Xena is open-source software for use in digital preservation. Xena is short for XML Electronic Normalising for Archives.

List & Label is a professional reporting tool for software developers. It provides comprehensive design, print and export functions. The software component runs on Microsoft Windows and can be implemented in desktop, cloud and web applications. List & Label can be used to create user-defined dashboards, lists, invoices, forms and labels. It supports many development environments, frameworks and programming languages such as Microsoft Visual Studio, Embarcadero RAD Studio, .NET Framework, .NET Core, ASP.NET, C++, Delphi, Java, C Sharp and some more. List & Label either retrieves data from various sources via data binding, or works database independent. Reports are designed and created in the so-called List & Label Designer and then exported into a multitude of formats like PDF, Excel, XHTML and RTF.

Solid PDF Tools

Solid PDF Tools is a document reconstruction software product which allows users to convert PDFs into editable documents and create PDFs from a variety of file sources. The same technology used in the software's Solid Framework SDK is licensed by Adobe for Acrobat X

Pandoc is a free and open-source document converter, widely used as a writing tool and as a basis for publishing workflows. It was created by John MacFarlane, a philosophy professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

References

  1. 1 2 "College project scoops award". Hereford Times. Newsquest Media Ltd. 4 January 2008. Archived from the original on 12 August 2010. Retrieved 11 August 2010.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.