As a sighted transcriber with the Department for Education in South Australia, I transcribe into braille literary, mathematics and other technical material, music, and languages such as French, German, Italian, Indonesian and Japanese. As technology has advanced and with the adoption of Unified English Braille, in the 30 plus years of my career, I have seen many changes.

One of the biggest changes that has occurred in the past 30 years is being able to source electronic documents to speed up the production of braille.

When I started my career as a transcriber, I would be given a paper document or book to painstakingly reproduce into braille using a Perkins Brailler. I was able to reproduce the text according to what my eyes and brain interpreted the text was saying. Then came the advent of the personal computer with word processing software. As these became more available braille translation software was developed which could take an electronic document and translate it into braille from which a hard copy could be made using an embosser. I could take my printed document and manually create an electronic document either typing it directly or scanning and editing. This document would then be put through translation software, edited and embossed. Again, as I created the word processing document, I was able to ensure that what I read with my eyes on the page was faithfully reproduced into braille.

The next technological development was OCR software whereby a printed page could be scanned and converted to electronic text, eliminating the need for manual typing. Around the same time came the braille display whereby not all braille needed to be physically embossed but could be read directly from a computer.

Now, more often than not, our source document comes to us already in an electronic format whether it is from a classroom teacher or a publisher. I now rarely need to manually type or scan text to produce braille.

Over the years, the accuracy of braille translation software has undergone continual improvement to the extent that the accuracy of translation is extremely high including mathematical and technical material.

But … the question needs to be asked, “is an electronic document the same as a printed document?” How can we ensure that an electronic document when translated to braille to be either physically embossed or read via a braille display, will accurately reflect what the original document says?

My personal experience is that whilst this is mostly correct, this assumption cannot be made.