Background

This site has been developed by a parent aimed at teachers and parents who are helping kids to learn braille and any other use cases where braille translation assistance is required. We are based in Australia and have a vision impaired daughter learning braille.

There is no government grant or private company involvement to date, rather just the product of a hobby interest in computer vision and braille. Maintaining this site and features continues to be a labour of love and desire to get this resource out to whomever needs it. Real costs such as hosting on a sufficiently powerful server to provide the image recognition features is not insignificant. Details on how you can support this effort is described below.

I have also started a not for profit association called Open Braille Project Incorporated ABN:47 895 400 826 in Australia in which this site and other future projects will operate under.

Support

There is the option to directly donate via DonorBox, Buy-me-a-Coffee or PayPal, all links below. Options include Credit Card, Paypal, GooglePay (Note: you do not need to have a paypal account for Credit Card option). All money donated will go towards web hosting costs to keep this site up and free for anyone to use.

 

 

 

paypal me direct link

News

Nov 2023: Added Romanian Braille and minor site maintenance

Aug 2022: Have resolved issue with Japenese Braille Kanji, but like German Braille there are some errors with back translation, however, this is being worked on by Liblouis volunteers and will update to the latest table when available.

Aug 2022: Upgraded Liblouis to latest version (3.22), Added the new German Grade 1 and Grade 2 Braille tables which support back translation (Braille to Text). However, I'm still seeing issues with back translation (braille to text). I'll keep the tables on the list to be used but please be aware that there may be errors.

July 2022: Added Tamil Grade 1 and Attempted to add Kanji Japanese table but resulted in an error, will investigate further and also test the new German tables

May 2022: A note on background work, we are quietly working away on development for a mobile app. This will perform better and cater for wider range of applications and in time have more features. We are excited about this project and have initial prototype concepts. But it will likely not be ready for some time.

Mar 2022: Site has been stable for over a year now since the March 2022 fix, but the fix came at higher hosting costs

June 2021: Created a not for profit association in Australia, it will run this project and any future projects related to braille, it is called OPEN BRAILLE PROJECT INCORPORATED ABN 47 895 400 826

April 2021: Fixed issue with Doublesided and Bounding box options not being consistent

Mar 2021: Measures have been taken to prevent occasional 504 errors and improve performance during translation. We have also added new options for Double sided braille and show braille detection boxes, as well as added new features in Braille to Text page

Jan 2021: Added edit page to correct image detection mistakes

Nov 2020: Added braille virtual keyboard in Braille to Text page

Oct 2020: Have integrated Liblouis library and using UEB grade 2 by default. Added more language support and Braille to text back translation

Sept 2020: Launching site for testing and see how image scan performs under load.

Future updates:

  • Adding more language tables. We found that back translation is not supported by Liblouis for Nemeth Maths and German tables, we are exploring other options
  • We are working hard to bring Mathematics translation for UEB and Nemeth
  • Exploring options to perform music braille translation to MusicXML and display on website, there is not much in this space and we see this as a longer-term project due to the unique challenges
  • Performing translations on hosted servers will not scale in the long run, for this reason we are also working on creating a mobile app that can perform the image detection and translation on its own, more to come soon
  • All of these projects will take time, we are working on exploring grants and donations to allow us to focus on bringing these exciting features to everyone as soon as possible

Resources

Contact

If you have any feedback or wish to get in touch with us you can send an e-mail to hello@abcbraille.com