[nobe-l] perky duck

[Steve Jacobson]

Kelsey,

I do not use Perky Duck, but I've asked around some.  My understanding is
that this software is used to directly produce braille rather than
translating documents into braille.  This means that many symbols are used
to produce dot combinations that make sense when you read them in braille
but do not make much sense when the corresponding characters are spoken.
You may already know this, but a special computer code was created many
years ago that defines 63 characters to correspond to the 63 dot
combinations that can exist in braille.  This code was created before the
computer code that one sees in magazines and books now, although some of the
characters that are used in today's computer code have their origin in this
old computer code.

As I understand it, you probably could use speech to edit your Perky Duck
files, but you would need to turn on all punctuation and you would also need
to know which symbols create which dot patterns.  You need to think a little
like a computer thinks, making some conversions in your head.  Maybe JAWS
has a script to make this easier, but it is hard to imagine that a script
could ever make this easy.  

To give you just a little idea of what I mean, in this computer braille, a
comma is defined as a dot 6.  Therefore, capital letters in braille are made
by preceeding the letter with the comma character.  Since numbers are
defined in the lower part of the cell, the number one creates a dot 2.  To
represent the literary one thousand, the characters used are number-sign a
one j j j.  A period generates dots 4-6 while the literary period (Dots
2-5-6) is created by a digit 4.  There are numerous other substitutions as
well.

Your best bet from what I understand is to learn how  best to interact with
your braille display, even though it is small.  Depending upon which modes
you have active, you might need to turn translation off on your display when
you are using Perky Duck.  

There could be options here of which I am not aware, and I'm only responding
because I have not seen many other responses.  The point is that there are
some real challenges to represent braille with speech, and there may not be
the simple answer you would like to find.  A character dictionary that would
change certain characters into their dot numbers might help, and you may
find something along those lines, but I thought it might be helpful to
explain the problem a little so you understand why the answer may not be
easy.

Best regards,

Steve Jacobson


-----Original Message-----
From: NOBE-L [mailto:nobe-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Kelsey Nicolay
via NOBE-L
Sent: Sunday, February 28, 2016 4:55 PM
To: National Organization of Blind Educators Mailing List
<nobe-l at nfbnet.org>
Cc: Kelsey Nicolay <kelseynicolay1989 at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [nobe-l] perky duck

Hi Ashley,
I'm using Perky Duck 11.2 which I think is the latest version.  I 
will contact Freedom Scientific to see if they can troubleshoot 
this.

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