Has anyone ever seen a 8 dot braille slate? I have search for one for many
years now..
Commonwealth Braille & Talking Book Cooperative
Greg Kearney, General Manager
#320, 185-911 Yates Street
Victoria, BC V8V 4Y9
CANADA
Email: info@xxxxxxxxx
U.S. Address
21908 Almaden Av.
Cupertino, CA 95014
UNITED STATES
Email: gkearney@xxxxxxxxx
On Aug 8, 2015, at 9:53 AM, Larry Skutchan <lskutchan@xxxxxxx> wrote:
This is an ingenious concept and article. Thank you very much.
One has to wonder, from the blind users' perspective, if much confusion could
be avoided while being able to maintain the ability to write with a stylus,
the merits of 8-dot braille that directly corresponds to the 256 characters
of the ASCII character set.
I am not necessarily advocating for this, I am just asking the question.
-----Original Message-----
From: liblouis-liblouisxml-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:liblouis-liblouisxml-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Susan Jolly
Sent: Friday, August 7, 2015 9:05 PM
To: liblouis-liblouisxml@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [liblouis-liblouisxml] Request for anyone interested in helping
sighted persons read braille
About a dozen years ago I got the idea that it would be easier for sighted
people like me to proofread braille if there was a special font that
displayed the local meaning of each braille cell. I actually persuaded a
font developer to develop such a font, which I called DotlessBraille, for
English literary braille. However, I could never find anyone sufficiently
interested in this idea to persue it.
Now that BrailleZephyr has side-by-side windows that allow a user to enter
braille using either six-key entry or full keyboard entry it reminded me of
my old idea. What BrailleZephyr does at the moment is to synchronize the
display of braille cells using a simulated braille font in one window with
the corresponding display of ASCII braille using a plain text font in the
other window. This has at least two advantages. One is that it supports
optional full keyboard entry of braille for people, like me, who prefer this
method to six-key entry. The other is that it can be tiring to read
simulated braille visually since the visual system seems to prefer connected
figures. Of course, in either case, the reader still has to know all the
different context-dependent meanings of the braille cells. ASCII braille
has only 63 different characters just as six-dot braille does.
DotlessBraille, in contrast to ASCII braille, displays the print equivalent
of contracted braille in a one-to-one correspondence with simulated braille.
Of course this requires various special glyphs including some that look as
though several print letters have been squashed together. Unfortunately the
font is not magic. It requires extra information that has either been saved
during autoamted forward translation or acquired via real-time
backtranslation.
Here's a sample and an article with more details.
http://www.dotlessbraille.org/screencap.htm
If there is anyone on this list who'd like to persue the use of
DotlessBraille in Braille Zephyr I'd love to hear from you. I also welcome
feedback of all sorts.
Sincerely,
Susan Jolly
www.dotlessbraille.org
For a description of the software, to download it and links to
project pages go to http://liblouis.org
For a description of the software, to download it and links to
project pages go to http://liblouis.org
