[BlindMath] Scanning braille for sight reading

[John G Heim]

I think what somebody else said was right -- the instructor is used to 
people taking photos with their phone and submitting that. But the whole 
reason I'm doing this is to find the best tools. I think I am going to 
see if I can find a linux text editor that allows me to generate brf 
files.  That ducksbury tool sounds interesting to me but right now, I 
must have linux.



On 07/26/2017 08:52 AM, Steve Jacobson via BlindMath wrote:
> 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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