ICEB General Assemblies and Mid-Terms

https://dApdots.ridbc.org.au

The results of the research into Oral Reading Fluency (ORF) of children around Australia and New Zealand who read braille will be shared. There were 73 students in total. These results were compared to Australian sighted normative data. Results were similar to findings in the United States where their rates were predicted to be lower than their sighted peers.

As well as students, 23 Itinerant Teachers gave feedback regarding braille specific resources and teaching strategies they found to be useful. These will be outlined in the presentation.

As well as the teachers' feedback, resources have been specifically produced to try and reduce the fluency gap. These are available for perusing.

Featuring the Welsh language, the longest place name in Europe, castles, Eisteddfod and famous Welsh people.

Braille Bonus by Mike Hudson, Museum Director, American Printing House for the Blind

Includes an agreement to refer the constitution and bylaws changes to the incoming Executive Committee, the report of the Braille Technology Committee, braille technology papers and the Code Maintenance Report and discussion.

As a blind adult who has learnt braille from my infancy and who has used braille throughout my professional and personal adult life, I feel it is important to emphasise the impact of using braille technology on a person's every-day life.

Braille devices are becoming more numerous and smaller, meaning they are portable and as such they can be used for a greater range of activities.

Braille devices can be stand-alone or connected to a range of other devices and this makes them more versatile and portable. Access to books has become more mainstream and braille devices can be used to read these rather than a reliance on audio.

Social media is a big part of people's lives and this can be accessed through the use of a braille device.

Use of the internet is essential to a person with a vision impairment today, and activities such as research; shopping or studying can be done easily using a braille device.

Watching foreign films using a braille display and certain devices is now possible as subtitles can be read and are available to a person with a vision impairment.

Plus more … Use of braille may increase privacy and multi-tasking. Access to such technologies means less to carry around. The adult with a vision impairment is able to use a range of technologies for a range of purposes and can choose what is best for the task. There are of course limitations and negatives and I am not advocating this as a do-all approach, but in teaching blind young people and adults to use a range of technologies (and braille seems to be an obvious example) it will make them more able to work in a range of ways.

This paper describes RNIB's systematic approach to reviewing and rectifying shortcomings in the open source Liblouis braille translation library relied on by popular screen reading and transcription products and services.

Since 2018, RNIB and international partners have identified over 3,000 errors in the existing Unified English Braille implementation, making Liblouis unsuitable in many education and employment settings. The paper describes the steps taken to collate lists of errors; work toward implementing corrections; and collaborate with international partners for peer review.

Underpinning this work is the global move to digital braille delivery, lower cost braille technology and UEB's reduced translation ambiguity.

While the Liblouis UEB table remains the primary focus of this work, other braille tables, e.g. Afrikaans, refer to the UEB table for underlying symbols.

The paper describes the process used to review the existing UEB tables, compile lists of errors, compare rules with dictionaries, devise new rules, test against word lists, peer review and sign in changes.

Stakeholders standing to benefit from this work include, but are not limited to, individual users of screen readers and braille translation software, students, teachers, transcribers, publishers, hardware and software manufacturers and rehabilitation professionals. The paper proposes practical ways in which stakeholders can support the project improving braille translation accuracy for everyone.

Dave Williams: Customer Experience Manager, Consumer Services, Royal National Institute of Blind People; Member of the Braille General Group, UK Association for Accessible Formats

James Bowden: Braille Technical Officer, RNIB; Chair of the UKAAF Braille Coding Group

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.

If someone had told me ten years ago that I could access nearly any book I wanted and that I could even read it in braille I would never have believed it. Automated braille translation (such as Apple's built-in braille support) has gone a long way towards making this a reality. Having said this, generating braille without human intervention does have its drawbacks. When is automated braille a viable option, when is it problematic and when is it quite simply a dream come true?

In this paper I will discuss the technical aspects of braille automation. I will also provide an overview of the advantages and disadvantages of automatic braille translation.

Electronically-generated braille is a foundational tool for literacy for blind people in our digital age. Unified English Braille (UEB), with its clearly defined rules and symbol structures, provides, on its own or in combination with other specialized braille codes, a means to render both accurate braille representation of any non-image-based content that originated in print, and accurate translation from braille to print of material electronically typed in braille.

In the years since Unified English Braille became the official standard braille code in ICEB member countries (four years ago for the United States, and much longer ago for others), some strides have been made in improving the accuracy of electronic print-to-braille and braille-to-print translation. However, some significant difficulties remain, placing unnecessary limits on the reliability of braille as a means for communication and collaboration.

This paper will explore the progress in improving accuracy of electronic braille since 2016 (including external, related technological developments); the details and impacts of some of the persistent but demonstrably correctable problems with electronic translation; and suggestions for bringing about improvements.

The RNIB has an extensive braille library available for customers to borrow in hard copy. Each book consists of several weighty volumes which are sent out and returned by free post.

With the advent of more affordable braille displays, more customers are asking if they can borrow the electronic files to read in digital form. This saves time, energy and resources.

In this paper we discuss steps to convert multi-volume braille files, which are suitable for embossing, to single volume files, more suited for use with braille displays.

We discuss the differences between embossable braille files and those for braille displays, as well as processes which can automate converting large numbers of existing titles and the changes to transcription processes that might be needed for producing new books in the future.

We touch on some of the main advantages and limitations of using electronic braille on current technology.

With no physical pages, we discuss the techniques customers can use to efficiently navigate the text using a braille display, and consider if new braille file formats might further improve navigational possibilities.

We concentrate on the braille layout used in the UK and by RNIB, but briefly consider any potential differences with the main features of other systems of braille layout and how these differences might affect navigating using current technologies.