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Braille Transcribers - I'm Developing a Piece of Transcription Software, What Do You Want to See and What Not? (self.Blind)
submitted by TheFake_VIP_yt
## Background
You know it's gunna be long when there are headings. anyway, I'm a 17 year old, blind, a-level Computer Science student. As part of my Computing qualification, I have to create an application of my choice. Given my interest in document processing and transcription, I decided to create a simple (compared to the commercial offerings that is) braille transcription app that allows you to import a print document of almost any format, convert it to braille and export it as a standard braille format (.brf, .brl, etc).
## Feedback
I'm currently in the "Analysis and Design," phase, so I haven't started any code yet. As part of my project, I need to do research on existing applications that are similar to my project idea, which in my case is programs like Duxbury, and Braille Blaster. I have downloaded and played with both, but although I read and use braille all the time, I have never transcribed a document myself. So, my questions to people who are experienced in this area are:
* What features (user interface / experience, translation / back-translation behaviour, available options, etc) do you like or find useful in existing transcription programs?
* What do you think needs improvement? Iwant not only your specific examples, but a list of your dreams for this one. Anything can be done with enough code.
# My Plan
The project gives you enough time to create a minimum viable product, so my focus will at first be to get basic formatting (bold, lists, tables, etc) working ontop of the plane-text base, which is already sorted for me (see below section). However, once the project is complete, I plan to open source the program and significantly extend it, hopefully creating a free, extensible optionfor people that need to access documents in braille. This is the point at which I'll try my best to make your dreams a reality.
## For the Technically Inclined
I'm planning on writing this in python3 and using three libraries:
* **WX Python** for the user interface.
* **LibLouis** for plane-text braille translation.
* **Pandoc** which will allow me to convert almost any document format into an *abstract syntax tree* for processing.
If there are any developers out there who have any tips or ideas, feel free to hit me up.
Sorry for the length of this post, I wanted to ask some questions but without creating an entire survey and being one of those people who don't provideany details until you click through to the survey itself. Stay safe and have a good day.
You know it's gunna be long when there are headings. anyway, I'm a 17 year old, blind, a-level Computer Science student. As part of my Computing qualification, I have to create an application of my choice. Given my interest in document processing and transcription, I decided to create a simple (compared to the commercial offerings that is) braille transcription app that allows you to import a print document of almost any format, convert it to braille and export it as a standard braille format (.brf, .brl, etc).
## Feedback
I'm currently in the "Analysis and Design," phase, so I haven't started any code yet. As part of my project, I need to do research on existing applications that are similar to my project idea, which in my case is programs like Duxbury, and Braille Blaster. I have downloaded and played with both, but although I read and use braille all the time, I have never transcribed a document myself. So, my questions to people who are experienced in this area are:
* What features (user interface / experience, translation / back-translation behaviour, available options, etc) do you like or find useful in existing transcription programs?
* What do you think needs improvement? Iwant not only your specific examples, but a list of your dreams for this one. Anything can be done with enough code.
# My Plan
The project gives you enough time to create a minimum viable product, so my focus will at first be to get basic formatting (bold, lists, tables, etc) working ontop of the plane-text base, which is already sorted for me (see below section). However, once the project is complete, I plan to open source the program and significantly extend it, hopefully creating a free, extensible optionfor people that need to access documents in braille. This is the point at which I'll try my best to make your dreams a reality.
## For the Technically Inclined
I'm planning on writing this in python3 and using three libraries:
* **WX Python** for the user interface.
* **LibLouis** for plane-text braille translation.
* **Pandoc** which will allow me to convert almost any document format into an *abstract syntax tree* for processing.
If there are any developers out there who have any tips or ideas, feel free to hit me up.
Sorry for the length of this post, I wanted to ask some questions but without creating an entire survey and being one of those people who don't provideany details until you click through to the survey itself. Stay safe and have a good day.
Sweet_Budget 2 points 3y ago
Full UTF8 and math support
TheFake_VIP_yt [OP] 2 points 3y ago
That's actually my largest focus, and the part that's going to take the longest. But I've been planning the maths conversion for a while now, including, hopefully, fixing some of the things Duxbury doesn't do that well.
CloudyBeep 2 points 3y ago
I'm not a braille transcriber, but I've played around with Duxbury a bit. Here are some thoughts.
• If you want this to be usable to people in lots of countries, you'll need to offer a few braille tables with predefined formatting styles because the US and UK for example have different rules for formatting. The US has probably almost 1000 formatting rules.
• I like coded view in Duxbury much better than formatted view.
• I like being able to add or modify styles.
• I like how Duxbury tries to select the most appropriate table format, but I wish it would learn my preferences. If I almost always use one table format, I probably don't want to spend 45 seconds changing every table to that format if it could do it for me. It's the same thing for lists.
• I don't like how you have to select the text you want to apply a style to. I'd like just being able to enter start and end tags like how you do for codes. I don't even like the highlight mode, but it's better than holding down keys to select the text. I don't like using start and end styles because then there's two sets of tags (a starting and closing beginning-style tag and a starting and closing ending-style tag.
You might want to put this question to email lists of braille transcribers like ozbrl and ueb-ed.
• If you want this to be usable to people in lots of countries, you'll need to offer a few braille tables with predefined formatting styles because the US and UK for example have different rules for formatting. The US has probably almost 1000 formatting rules.
• I like coded view in Duxbury much better than formatted view.
• I like being able to add or modify styles.
• I like how Duxbury tries to select the most appropriate table format, but I wish it would learn my preferences. If I almost always use one table format, I probably don't want to spend 45 seconds changing every table to that format if it could do it for me. It's the same thing for lists.
• I don't like how you have to select the text you want to apply a style to. I'd like just being able to enter start and end tags like how you do for codes. I don't even like the highlight mode, but it's better than holding down keys to select the text. I don't like using start and end styles because then there's two sets of tags (a starting and closing beginning-style tag and a starting and closing ending-style tag.
You might want to put this question to email lists of braille transcribers like ozbrl and ueb-ed.
TheFake_VIP_yt [OP] 2 points 3y ago
This is very, very useful, thanks very much. I will definitely look into those email lists, and more communities besides. I've also got an amazing group of transcribers (my VI Team) that I can, have been and will be talking to about this.
CloudyBeep 2 points 3y ago
I'm glad you liked it. If you want someone to help with testing a version you want to make available to the public, I'd be happy to help out, and by then I might have my braille certification.
TheFake_VIP_yt [OP] 2 points 3y ago
Thanks, I'll be sure to post a link to this sub when I've made a version with enough features to be considered useful.
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