[Trainer-talk] Back to Braille Translation Software and Windows 7

[David Goldfield]

Hello.
Several weeks ago there were a few messages regarding Wintrans, a 
Windows interface to the DOS-based NFBTrans program.  Today I did some 
initial testing with this program on a 32-bit Windows 7 machine.  On the 
positive side, the program actually worked in that I was able to open 
it, read it with a screen reader and was able to translate a text file 
into a Grade 2 file.  The printer settings seem to default to lpt1 and I 
doubt there is any way to easily tell this program to use a printer on a 
USB port, although someone else may have a workaround for this problem.  
At least I know that I can now run Wintrans on a Windows 7 machine to at 
least translate and, presumably, back-translate files which are text 
documents.

I also began doing some tests using an extension for Libreoffice which 
allows the user to take a document written in Writer and have it 
embossed into Grade 2 Braille.  Libreoffice is a spinoff project of 
Openoffice and it can be downloaded at
www.libreoffice.org

The ODT2Braille extension, which works for both Libreoffice and 
Openoffice can be downloaded from
http://odt2braille.sourceforge.net/downloads.html

I am in no way trying to suggest that all Windows users can now erase 
Duxbury from their hard drives and replace it with this set of programs 
as this is certainly not the case.  However, I'm always on the lookout 
for freeware for my students and I've wanted to play with this for some 
time.
First, if you're dependent on a screen reader this may not be for you as 
you really have to go through some hoops to get OpenOffice or 
Libreoffice to work well with speech output packages.  The JAVA Access 
Bridge needs to be installed and Openoffice/Libreoffice needs to have 
assistive technology support enabled, and that's very hard to do 
considering it's disabled by default and getting to that option with a 
screen reader, though not impossible, is tricky.  Even when you do all 
of this its word processor Writer doesn't seem to work consistently with 
JAWS; once JAWS would repeat the word "edit" everytime I move through my 
document but this didn't happen most of the time.  It works with 
Window-eyes once you use the insert-ctrl-C hotkey to get Window-eyes to 
find the system cursor.  Writer consistenly works well with NVDA, 
however, as does the spreadsheet program called Calc.  If you decide to 
use Libreoffice make sure you download the additional English help pack 
and install it as it provides extra help information as you move through 
menus and dialogs; NVDA reads this automatically.
Well, if you haven't yet tried these packages I've probably succeeded in 
scaring off anyone even thinking about installing them, but that wasn't 
my intent.  These programs are compatible with Microsoft Office and use 
the familiar menu bar for navigation.  I think it's commendable that 
someone has been working on an extension to allow Grade 2 embossing from 
these packages and I am sure this project will improve with time and 
feedback from testers.

David