I am looking for a freeware programme for either DOS or Win98/Win32 that can take a file written in ASCII Braille (they sometimes call it "Web-Braille") and can automatically convert it into readable English text, and vice-versa. Specifically, I have a friend/co-worker who is mostly blind and uses one of those nifty Braille machines occasionally, and sometimes she sends me stuff in Braille ASCII.......but as of the present moment I don't have any way to read it!

(If you display an ASCII Braille text file in a word processor it looks like a meaningless mash-up of letters, numbers and punctuation marks, kinda' like what you'd see in a Navtex programme if the reception is really bad and you have the FEC turned off--for example, look at this Mariners schedule, in Braille, from the WTBBL if you are curious. The Wikipedia page I linked above gives a "conversion table" of sorts but I've neither the time nor the patience to figure that out and try decoding it by hand.......)

Any ideas?

So the question is: are there any freeware programmes available that can translate ASCII Braille into readable English text?





Anyone? Show of hands??

http://www.virtintern.duke.edu/2003fall/braille/virtualtour3.htm

On that page you will find the translation table in Excel. Most of the projects I saw after Googling were hardware things. Some very cool.

You know, a little bit of PERL could do this easily enough, given the ASCII BRAILLE input.

Can you do any programming? If so, that spreadsheet contains what you need.

Put regular ASCII in one array in memory.

Read the file, byte by byte, using the character value as an index into that array.

Write the indexed value to a new file.

There are more charts and some info here.

http://www.dotlessbraille.org/

I knew you would have the answer Missing.

This is fascinating stuff.

Thanks Motozak.

Littlesongs--you bet.

I have had an interest in this kind of stuff since I was a child......I even taught myself how to read Braille by sight when I was in third grade. I could make sense of it enough to understand and comprehend what was written. (In other words, I hadn't really mastered it completely.) But that was 15 years ago.....I seem a bit lost when I look at a page of Braille nowdays......

(I do need to re-learn it!!)

I found a neat little programme (well, suite of programmes actually) through the "Links to several good Braille websites" link on the "Helpful Websites" part of the Duke page Missing linked to, called "Pokadot" (http://www.braille-pokadot.com/)......it also includes a programme called "BrProof" that can translate ASCII Braille into regular English text.

(It's not 100% perfect, as it still seems to want to diaplay the occasional "at-sign" or "capitalisation comma" in the text from time to time. But I was using the Mariners' schedule to test it with, so they might also just be errors in that file as well......maybe a poor transcription or something.........)

I haven't tried it yet but Pokadot converts standard text into Braille, according to the literature accompanying the software......I know my friend would like that.

Thanks Missing ;o)