[Trainer-Talk] Translating brail to text

[David Goldfield]

Hello. First, as a long-time subscriber to this list as well as someone who has been working in the assistive technology field for quite some time I'd like to encourage you, tress2005, to join this list directly. This will give you access to the other interesting conversations that happen on this list as well as giving you a forum to ask other trainers and savvy tech users your own questions. You can get subscription info here<https://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/trainer-talk_nfbnet.org> along with the group archives.

Duxbury<https://duxburysystems.com/> has always been the gold standard when it comes to Braille translation. They've been in the Braille translation business since the 1970s so they do know their business. The cost for their software is $695.00.

Braille Blaster<https://www.brailleblaster.org/> is a free translation program from the American Printing House for the Blind but I don't believe it offers back translation from Braille to text.

A free program that I've occasionally and successfully used was WinBT. However, it's now very difficult to locate online and has not been developed in years and does not offer UEB support. I've never tested its back translation with UEB files. It was a wonderful program. It was initially called NFBTrans and I think it was originally a DOS application. Wintrans was a Windows version of that program and WinBT was designed for more modern operating systems. If you do a lot of Internet searching you may well find it. I do wish that the NFB would keep an archive of the software available even though it lacks support for UEB. I've stumbled across a few other translators but they seem to either only go from print to Braille and in the case of Braille2000, the page seems not to have been updated since 2012 and so I wouldn't consider it. Sadly, since Raised Dot Computing is no longer around we no longer have their wonderful translation packages such as Hot Dots or Megadots. It's possible that some of today's Braille computers, sadly referred to as notetakers, might be able to convert a Braille file into text. As I don't use devices such as the BrailleNote or BrailleSense I can't speak authoritatively about those products but I'm sure many others on this list can fill in those gaps.

If you have a Victor Reader product you can at least listen to a contracted Braille file and navigate it as though it was a standard text file but this isn't quite the same as converting the file into text.

Hope this helps.





David Goldfield,

Blindness Assistive Technology Specialist

JAWS Certified, 2019

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-----Original Message-----
From: Trainer-Talk <trainer-talk-bounces at nfbnet.org<mailto:trainer-talk-bounces at nfbnet.org>> On Behalf Of JASON ALAMILLO via Trainer-Talk
Sent: Monday, September 13, 2021 6:46 PM
To: trainer-talk at nfbnet.org<mailto:trainer-talk at nfbnet.org>
Cc: JASON ALAMILLO <leadershipjba at gmail.com<mailto:leadershipjba at gmail.com>>; tress2005 at gmail.com<mailto:tress2005 at gmail.com>
Subject: [Trainer-Talk] Translating brail to text



Hello all. I have a friend copied on this email so she can see all of your replies. She is now a new assistive technology instructor at one of our centers here in Nevada and she will be working with a variety of clients. Side note, she is also one of my clients, and we worked a lot together especially in 2020. She is currently enrolled in a masters AT program in a university, online of course, and she is in an intro to braille class. She wanted to know if there is a software where she can translate braille to regular text. So for example, BRF files to text, word, things like that. If there is, which would you recommend? If there is a cost to any of them, how much would it be and do they have any deals? And if there are any free software products that translate braille to text, that would be helpful as well. Thank you so much.

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