[BlindMath] Scanning braille for sight reading

[Steve Jacobson]

John,

I can see where increasing the DPI might help since the braille dot is
smaller than most characters.  Another thing to experiment with is whether
your scanner is getting the image in black and white or color.  I frankly
don't know which will work the best because such things seem variable.  I
have had cases, though, where low contrast differences on a page came out
better in black and white because of the binary nature, but it seems likely
that approach might cause some dots to not show at all falling below a
threshold.  Obviously, the brightness sensitivity can also matter.  I would
think that an instructor in such a course would have very specific
recommendations, though, or perhaps Hadley itself.  This does not seem like
it would be an unusual problem.

I, for one, would be interested to hear what you find out.  I don't
remember, are you an Optacon user?

Best regards,

Steve Jacobson

-----Original Message-----
From: BlindMath [mailto:blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of John G.
Heim via BlindMath
Sent: Wednesday, July 26, 2017 7:12 AM
To: Blind Math list for those interested in mathematics
<blindmath at nfbnet.org>
Cc: John G. Heim <jheim at math.wisc.edu>
Subject: Re: [BlindMath] Scanning braille for sight reading

My instructor is sighted. She can sight-read the braille if the dots 
come up clearly enough in the scanned document. I guess I wouldn't be 
taking the course if I could see but if I could, all I'd have to do is 
to keep tweaking the scanner settings until it worked. I think the first 
thing I am going to do is increase the DPI. There is a lot of info out 
there that says 300 DPI is best for OCR and my own experiments have 
confirmed that.  But a higher DPI might be better just to get braille 
dots to show up on a scanner.



On 07/26/2017 04:43 AM, George Bell wrote:
> Hi John,
>
> Scanning embossed braille is not an easy task.  Indeed there was once a
> program called "OBR" (Optical Braille Recognition).  But even that
required
> that specific makes and models of scanner be used, which allowed control
of
> lighting during the scan.
>
> You instructor should know this.
>
> Do I get the impression you are using a Perkins type braille writer as
> opposed to say 6 key entry into PC braille software such as Duxbury?
>
> George
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: BlindMath [mailto:blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of John G
> Heim via BlindMath
> Sent: 25 July 2017 15:02
> To: Blind Math list for those interested in mathematics
> Cc: John G Heim
> Subject: [BlindMath] Scanning braille for sight reading
>
> I'm taking a braille class through Hadley School for the Blind. I am
trying
> to submit my homework assignments as scanned images of braille pages for
the
> instructor to sight-read. The instructor asked me to scan them as photos
but
> I don't know what that means. Does anybody have experience scanning in
> braille and can tell me the best format, mode, and dpi settings? I sent my
> instructor tif line-art at 300 dpi which works well for OCR but that
didn't
> work for sight-reading braille.
>
>
> --
> --
> John G. Heim; jheim at math.wisc.edu; sip://jheim@sip.linphone.org
>
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