AI-Generated Transcript
Hello, everybody, and welcome to Basics with BITS here on Saturday afternoon.
We’re happy to have you all here and listening, whether you’re live here in the Zoom room with us on Clubhouse or on ACB Media 6, I think, right?
Before we get started, thank you, Meka, for hosting this.
And thanks to Michael for running the technical side of things and putting us on the air and connecting us with Clubhouse and all that good stuff.
Today we have a very special presentation for you guys on continuing our month of Braille and technology.
And before we get started, I want to mention to you that this is brought to you by BITS,
Blind Information Technology Solutions, a special interest affiliate of the American Council of the Blind.
If you wish to join BITS, go to bits-acb. org.
That’s B-I-T-S dash or hyphen A-C-B dot O-R-G.
If you want to join, it’s $20 a year, and there’s an amazing amount of education, just like what you’re going to get a taste of here over the next hour.
We have quite a bit of presentations that are BITS member exclusives, but we have chats that are open to anybody and everybody where we can come in and get some help.
And we have dedicated tech support help for people with some of their problems through the ask at bits-acb. org, which I’ll talk more about at the end of this call.
So in the meantime, though, I want to go ahead and turn this over to Deborah Armstrong, who’s going to present today on the BrailleBlaster.
Deborah, thank you for doing this, and the floor is yours.
This is Debee Armstrong, and today I’m here to talk to you about BrailleBlaster.
That’s B-R-A-I-L-L-E-B-L-A-S-T-E-R, all one word, with the two B’s capitalized.
BrailleBlaster is a Braille translation program.
You’ve probably heard of Duxbury, which is also a Braille translation program, and for many years it has become the standard.
But Braille translation now can be done for free.
Duxbury is copy protected. It is also expensive.
BrailleBlaster may not be perfect, but it doesn’t cost anything.
It’s not copy protected. It can be downloaded and used by everyone.
It runs on Windows, it runs on Linux, and it runs on the Mac.
BrailleBlaster can be easily used by people who don’t know Braille or don’t know Braille very well.
It has a visually rich interface, so it’s easy for a sighted person to see what they’re doing,
including seeing the Braille dots on screen.
But it’s also fully accessible with your screen reader.
So it really doesn’t matter how much you see if you need to use it.
BrailleBlaster was designed and is distributed by APH, the American Printing House for the Blind.
Originally, it was designed so that Braille transcribers could get their Braille done faster.
In the K-12 system that is elementary through high school, kids get their textbooks from the school.
They don’t need to buy them.
And there are laws now that require that the digital version of the textbooks gets downloaded
so that you can jump between chapters and sections.
The thing about these textbooks is that it takes a while to transcribe them
transcribing. For example, if I have a Word document that already has bold
facing and underlining, it already has headings, and it’s all nicely formatted.
If I open it in BrailleBlaster, all that formatting is preserved. So lists and
headings and underlining and bold facing will automatically be translated into
to the Braille formatting equivalents, and I won’t have to go through and manually clean it up.
Another thing I like about BrailleBlaster is that the translation process is automatic. In many
translation programs, you have a print view, and you type in or import the text you want translated,
and then you hit the translation button, and you have a Braille view. Well, in BrailleBlaster,
the translation is being done in the background all the time. So once you are editing and working
Braille view on, but I would have it show me the dots rather than the electronic, the digital
version of the Braille, because I would like to be able to see what the page is going to look like.
But since I’m not sighted, I pretty much just stay in the print view. So we’re going to start by going
to www. BrailleBlaster. org, and we’re going to have the screen reader using the Nathan voice
read us a little bit of the website just the important parts though in end heading level 1
choice in braille transcription software BrailleBlaster registered is a braille transcription
program developed by the american printing house for the blind to help transcribers provide blind
students with Braille textbooks on the first day of class.
Visited link download, link FAQ, visited link documentation, link donate
Logo of the American Printing House for the Blind Graphic
Heading level 2 What is BrailleBlaster?
BrailleBlaster takes advantage of the rich markup contained in NIMAS National Instructional
Materials Accessibility Standard files to automate basic formatting and gives you tools
to make advanced tasks quicker and easier.
Designed primarily for editing textbooks that meet the specifications published by the Braille Authority of North America,
the purpose of BrailleBlaster is to help Braille producers ensure that every student has their Braille textbooks on the first day of class.
BrailleBlaster relies on Link Liblawis, a well-known open-source Braille translator,
for translating text and mathematics to Braille.
Screenshot of BrailleBlaster side-by-side print and Braille views graphic.
Heading level two BrailleBlaster features list of eight items.
Bullet translate Braille accurately in UEB or EBI.
Bullet format Braille.
Bullet split books into volumes.
Bullet add transcriber notes.
Bullet describe images.
Bullet automate a variety of table styles.
Bullet translate and edit single line math.
Bullet do much more.
So you see there’s a good description there of what the program does.
And there’s actually a lot more.
We’re not going to read the whole thing.
There is our links to download the program, to read the documentation.
Okay, the next thing we’re going to do is download it and we’re going to install it.
And I am not going to spend the time here since we only have an hour on that process.
But I will let you hear a little bit of the download.
And then I can talk to you a bit about the process of installing it.
Heading level one, getting BrailleBlaster list of three items, bullet visited link.
Visit the download site for installation packages.
And this is the page that’s going to appear when you select download.
But actually, it’s just a huge list of release notes.
So it tells you to visit the download site to download it.
So you have to first select download.
Then you have to select the link for visit the download site.
and then you finally do get to the download site.
Heading level one BrailleBlaster version three, two, one.
Link install and launch.
Link download zip.
Link download B6.
Link download a pinstaller.
Other platforms.
Link macOS.
Link Linux.
Link graphic packaged with conveyor.
So when you’re hearing that you’re on the correct download page.
And 3.1.1, the last version,
is dated January 12th.
So as of now, it is the most current version.
And as you can see,
you can also get it for the Mac as well.
Link install and launch.
Downloading.
BrailleBlaster 1X, 790 kilobytes.
Downloads completed.
Press Control-J to go to downloads.
Couple of things here.
So my computer is set
so it won’t automatically launch anything.
So I have to go to downloads and find the file
And then when I press enter on it, then it will launch.
But your computer may not be set up that way.
So if you do install and launch, that may be exactly what happens.
It may download it and start the installation process immediately.
The other thing is you might have noticed it said BrailleBlaster 1.
Well, that’s because I had already installed it.
So I had a BrailleBlaster. exe file.
And Windows helpfully renamed this one to BrailleBlaster left paren 1, right paren period exe.
But it is, in fact, a 3.11.
And Windows was just renaming it for me because I had a version already in my downloads directory.
So if that happens to you, don’t let that throw you either.
All right.
Now, when you install it, you get the usual prompt to agree to the license.
Radio buttons, I agree.
I disagree.
you pick I agree, and then you can just keep hitting next to go through the installation.
You can choose whether you want an icon in your desktop or not, but it will default to everything
fine. You don’t have to pick a directory or you don’t have to make any other decisions. You just
keep hitting next. And of course, once it installs, you’re going to want to open it.
And it’s going to open to the text view. And when it’s in the text view, it will show you
any text you either type or if you open a file any text from that file and you’re going to know
you’re in this text view and that it’s empty because you’re going to be hearing some beeping.
So now we’re going to go through all of the menus. It has a standard menu bar so if you hit the alt
key you can move across it with arrow keys and here each hotkey for each menu item.
The file menu, of course, is where you’re going to open files.
You can open Word files, HTML files, EPUB files.
Ebooks are in EPUB format many times.
It also opens a variety of more technical files I’m not going to discuss here.
But one thing that’s interesting is it opens XHTML files, which are part of Daisy books.
So if you look at a Daisy book and you have that XHTML file, it will open that.
It will open a LaTeX file, which is math, and turn it into math automatically, which can be really nice.
And it’s also going to open Braille-ready files, BRL or BRF.
So if you have a book from NLS that was already in a BRF format, you can open it there.
You will not be able to change the line length on those BRL or BRF files.
But if you have something that’s BRL or BRF that came from a Braille note taker, you can also open it in there.
So let’s just see what’s on the file menu now.
File, F, new control plus N, N, open control plus O, O, recent document submenu, R, recent auto save submenu, R, save control plus S, S, save as control plus shift plus S, A,
Export submenu, E. Print control plus P, P. Emboss control plus E, M. Braille preview alt plus home, B. Close control plus W, C. Exit alt plus F4, E.
Now you notice you’re often hearing two keystrokes, and that’s because the control keystrokes, like Ctrl-S for save, are going to be active anywhere.
But then when you just hear S, save S, that means you’re only going to hit that shortcut key when you’re actually in that menu.
So Ctrl-E will emboss, but if you are in the file menu and you want to go directly to emboss, you would then hit the E key.
So hopefully that’s not too confusing.
We’re now going to take a look at the edit menu.
Edit, E. Cut control plus X, C. Copy control plus C, O. Copy as unicode, C. Paste control plus V, P. Paste as math control plus shift plus M, P. Undo control plus Z, U. Redo control plus Y, R.
Edit page number, E. Find and replace control plus F, R. Repeat last search F3, R. Page break
if you have something in the text editor where the lines are run together and you want to be
in braille that there’s a new line starting, that’s where you would do a new line break.
Right. Let’s take a look at the next menu.
Navigate. N. Go to page control plus G. Home control plus home. N control plus end. E.
Book tree alt plus end. Previous element control plus up. P. Next element control plus down.
Bookmarks control plus shift plus K.
And of course, this is how you move around the document. A couple of explanations here. The
and previous element are the next and previous style. So like if you switched between a body
style and a list style, or you switch between a heading style and the poetry style, that’s where
But I want to say that many of these features are more for transcribers.
And the program BrailleBlaster has really been adopted by teachers for the visually impaired
and paraprofessionals who just want to quick do a quick and dirty handout for a blind student.
Or if you’re at home and you’ve got something you received from BITS
and you want to quickly transcribe it so you can see it in Braille,
BrailleBlaster works great for that, and you don’t have to understand all these menu choices to work effectively with it.
And here’s our next menu.
View. V. Toggle View Submenu. T. Toolbar Submenu. T. Icon Size Submenu. I. View Braille Checked. B. Increase Font Size Control++. I. Decrease Font Size Control++’.
Now if you’re low vision, you’re going to really want to increase the font size.
And if you are used to working with a braille display, you might want to actually turn on
the braille view.
And the braille view can let you see it as dots or as the kind of electronic braille
that will show up on your braille display properly as contracted braille.
The view menu will let you toggle views, which means you can turn any of them on or off.
If you are working with a fully sighted person, they may want to actually have all of the
views on, and there’s several views which I’m now going to show you.
Tall plus B checked.
P.
Braille checked.
B.
Style checked.
S.
Breadcrumbs checked.
B.
Rearrange views dot dot dot.
R.
And of course, visually you can rearrange the views.
So you can put the text next to the Braille, the styles next to the Braille,
or rearrange them any way you want on the screen.
But you can also move between those views with a keystroke.
And of course, I don’t remember that keystroke right now.
But usually I just keep the print view on and I don’t pull up the other views until I need them.
Though sometimes I’ll put the style view to the left of the print view.
So JAWS will automatically read the style as I move up and down.
And I’ll be demonstrating that in just a minute.
Tools.
T.
Correct Braille Translation Control plus T.
Six key mode Alt plus X.
Table Editor, T, Convert Text to Table, C, Convert to Print Page Number Control Plus 5, C, Change Translation Submenu, C, Contraction Relaxer, C.
And of course, many of these tools are really only useful if you’re a transcriber.
If you do braille transcribing in your job, though, or you fix braille files,
you might want to go into the documentation and read up on this stuff.
But if you’re just at home trying to braille a recipe or a handout,
I wouldn’t really worry about most of what’s available in the tools.
Settings. S. Page Properties. P. Translation Settings. T. Page Numbers. N. Format Settings.
F. Embosser Settings B. Status Bar Settings S.
Settings can be important to you, and there’s a couple of ways to get to these settings.
You can do it like I just did by going to the menu, picking settings, and down arrowing
all those choices.
Or if you’re at any one of those settings choices, what’s going to happen is that it’s
tabbed dialogue.
So if you get to the tab control and you do control page up, control page down, or control
tab or control shift tab, you will move between the tabs in that dialog. So you can jump quickly,
say, from the status bar settings to the embosser settings if you want to do a few control tabs to
And of course, embosser settings are going to be what you’re going to want to look at because
you need to set up your embosser. It’s going to default to a 40 character line, 25 lines per page.
And so if, like me, you have a Romeo, you’re going to want slightly different settings.
Embosser settings tab selected.
Control plus page down.
Default embosser combo box.
Romeo.
Two of two.
Add.
Button.
Alt plus A.
Edit.
Button.
Alt plus E.
Remove button.
Alt plus R.
OK button.
So you can add an embosser or you can edit the existing embosser.
Now, when you add or edit, they really have improved this dialog box.
You can pick your manufacturer, you can pick your model,
and it will automatically know the number of lines per page and the number of characters per line.
Or you can add an unknown manufacturer, and then you are prompted to enter all of that stuff manually.
So that works pretty well.
And I have configured it for several embossers,
And that usually is quite successful.
Next to our settings menu is our emphasis menu.
And again, this is mostly for transcribers.
I’m just showing it to you so if you get stuck in here,
you’ll know where you are in the whole menu map of this software.
Emphasis, A. Bold Control plus B. B. Italics Control plus I. I.
Underline Control plus U. U. Script Shift plus Alt plus S.
S. Transcriber note symbols.
T. Transcriber dash defined type form submenu.
T. Remove emphasis from selection control plus shift plus R.
R. Remove all emphasis from headings.
R. Remove emphasis from list prefixes.
R. Remove emphasis from alphabetic reference entry words.
R.
Next to emphasis is styles.
Now a style is how you format a paragraph.
And it works just like it does in Word.
You select a paragraph, you select a style, and it’s formatted that way.
You may think, well, with Braille, why do we need styles?
But let’s suppose you want to do poetry, and so you need to have the lines of it indented.
The poem may be a large paragraph, but each line of a particular line of the poem might
poetry style.
I’ve talked about headings and lists, but there’s also a larger variety of styles.
so let’s check them out.
styles insert i note separation line l insert image i table t running head r blank print page
b insert unicode i insert link control plus k i note separation line l insert image i table t
Escape, Insert, UpMath, M, Math Translation Toggle Plus Control Plus M, M, Numeric Series, N, ASCII Math Hub, A, Spatial Math Editor, S, NUMATH Block, N, NUMATH Inline, N, Numeric Passage Block, N, Numeric Passage Inline, N, Math Help, M, Math Translation Toggle Plus Control Plus M, M.
Now, under styles, many of those have submenus, but the only one you’d really want to worry about if you’re transcribing from home and just doing casual braille is basic.
And under basic, you will see things like the body style, which is the same thing as the normal style in Word.
Next to the styles menu is the math menu.
I’m going to skip it because we are running out of time.
And then after that, we have a help menu.
Help, H. BrailleBlaster website, B. BrailleBlaster user guide F1, B. About BrailleBlaster, A.
Privacy settings, P. View log, L. Reset BB, R. Check for updates, C.
So that’s the whole menu system. Now how to find something if you read about it in
documentation. So let’s quickly fix up a document for Braille translation.
So we’re going to start with a recipe that came from one of Sheila Young’s documents
associated with her cooking community call.
Red Robin Campfire Sauce.
Blank.
Four tablespoons mayonnaise.
Four tablespoons barbecue sauce.
One tablespoon honey.
Two teaspoons smoked paprika.
One drop liquid smoke.
Mix all ingredients in a small bowl.
Cover and refrigerate for up to two hours before serving.
Okay, cute little recipe. So I am selecting the top line, and I’m going into styles, and I’m picking heading level one. Then I’m selecting the ingredients, I’m going into styles, and I’m picking list. And then I’m selecting the instructions, and I’m going into styles, I’m going into basic, and I’m picking body text. And I’m going to just let you hear the finished result.
Heading 1. Red Robin Campfire Sauce. Blank. Container-List List 1. 4 Tablespoons Mayonnaise.
4 Tablespoons Barbecue Sauce. 1 Tablespoon Honey. 2 Teaspoons Smoked Paprika. 1 Drop Liquid Smoke.
Body Text. Mix all ingredients in a small bowl. Cover and refrigerate for up to 2 hours before serving.
Now, just for fun, I want you to hear what it sounds like if you read the raw Braille output.
As you may know, Braille has been translated into computer codes that look like gibberish when you read them on the screen.
For example, the T-H-E sign is also the exclamation point in computer braille.
Dots 2, 3, 4, 6 actually turns out to be the exclamation point if you look at it on your screen.
But if you look at it on a braille display without any translation, it’s the T-H-E sign.
I hope that makes sense.
But anyway, if you happen to be looking at this in the Braille view of speech, or you happen to be visually looking at it on the screen, it’s going to sound like garbage.
So we’ll just read a little piece of that to make you understand how that is.
Four spaces comma, R dollar comma, Rob 9 campfire sauce.
Left margin one space.
Left margin number D ta number spoons mayonnaise.
Number D ta number spoons B greater BQ sauce.
Number A ta number spoon H quote oi.
Number BT one spoon smock dollar paprika, comma, quote, mix all nine GR dollar I5 TS9A small B left bracket L4.
Now, I did not let that finish because it’s just gibberish.
But if you see that kind of gibberish on your screen, don’t worry about it.
When you save a file as a BRF or BRL, that’s what you’re going to see on the computer.
But on a Braille display, if you don’t have any translation enabled, you don’t want to translate a translation, then it’s going to look perfect, like perfectly good Braille.
BrailleBlaster can do Spanish Braille.
It can do Cherokee Braille.
And it can also do, of course, EBI, the Old Fashioned Grade 2.
And it can do UEB.
And it can do uncontracted versions of both UEB and EBI.
So no matter what Braille you need, if it’s English Braille,
you’re pretty sure you’re going to be able to get that from BrailleBlaster.
So basically, to finish up with this pre-recorded presentation,
The steps for BrailleBlaster are to install it, open it up, go into settings, make any changes you want,
go into embosser settings in particular, make sure you’ve got your embosser set up properly,
open a document, if you have one you want to put into Braille,
turn on the style view so that you can actually see and hear what the styles are,
arrow around in the document and see if it’s applied the styles you want.
Often it does so automatically.
If not, go ahead and change that.
And then when you’re all ready, you probably want to save it.
It’ll save it in a BrailleBlaster format.
Or you can do export just for good measure and export it to a BRF file.
And that BRF file will be formatted for your current embosser settings.
And then lastly, you would probably emboss it after you saved it.
And you’re done.
I’m ready for questions.
And you can start raising your hand now.
I’m going to just say like five more sentences before I take questions.
I did make a big goof here.
And that goof is that I accidentally showed you the math menu when I was telling you about the styles menu.
So if we get time at the end, or if someone has a question about styles, what I’ll do is I’ll just run through it really quickly without sharing my screen.
And I’m really sorry about that mistake.
And again, big thank you to Michael, who did an excellent job editing my recording at the last minute.
And I’m ready for questions.
All right.
Carla?
Yes, Debbie.
This is confusing, but it’s a very good presentation.
Thank you so much.
But I have a rather intriguing question.
As you may know, I do a lot of technical translating.
And I end up with documents that have several languages in one document.
They may be in tabular format going across language for language.
And I was intrigued when I heard it say, enter Unicode character.
And I’ve been trying to get Braille note takers to do this because what I would like to do,
instead of having individual languages enabled when I’m preparing a document for a client,
And I would like to be able to just put a control acute and put the next letter with the accent so that I could do French in one column, I could do Spanish in one column, German in another column.
Is this possible?
It sounds like it might be with BrailleBlaster from the sounds of that Unicode character thing.
It should be.
I took a Spanish class where I had to read aloud in class a lot.
It’s well-sighted people, right?
And I remember having to enter Unicode characters in an earlier version of BrailleBlaster.
And it worked, but it would enter random Unicode characters in other places.
And they do tell me they fixed that bug.
So I really hope they do.
Carla, I have your email.
I’m going to try it out with some of my old Spanish handouts now that this is a newer version of BrailleBlaster and see if it still works.
And I will try to get back to you and tell you if it actually still works.
Because I remember being able to do it when I was taking that class, and it was really helpful.
Because having to read out loud in class from a Braille display is kind of scary.
So I was embossing everything I had to read out loud and cursing the sighted teacher who made us all do so much reading in class.
Carla:But with like the Apex, BrailleNote Apex used to be able to let me to enter these universal characters.
but none of the modern note takers do when I’m preparing something to be translated into print. what I’m saying?
Deborah:
Well, I do all of that in Word.
I’m really good at language switching in Word because I have transcribed several books
there’s a few lines in English and a few lines in Spanish.
But Spanish and German are the only languages I can do, but I’ve done that a lot in Word.
But I’ve never used a Braille note taker to do it, so I can’t help you there.
Carla:
Sometimes I’m doing it on a bus, and I’d rather not have my whole computer with me because I’m going to take a long bus trip to one of my jobs.
And that’s why I don’t do it on a bus.
Deborah:
I so understand that.
Unfortunately, I’m too poor to buy myself a Braille note taker.
But I can tell you I will try it out because I have plenty of old Spanish handouts.
A subjunctive was giving me fit.
So I will pull up some of those and try entering Unicode characters in them.
Thank you.
Why don’t I go through the style menu and tell you what’s there since I goofed up.
And I’m not going to share my screen.
I’ll just tell you.
So you’re going to do Alt-L to get to the styles menu.
And then you’re there.
And you’re going to down arrow and you’re going to see repeat last style, which is the first thing.
Configure.
Options.
And then basics.
and then I’m going to go under basics with enter and I’m going to tell you what’s there.
Block text, body text, center text, display 3-5, and that’s all that’s under basic. Oh,
well, it has displayed body text and I don’t understand what the difference between displayed
Okay, under basics, remember I told you we were looking at basics and then I opened it up and now I’ve closed it and now I’m looking at captions.
I’m going to press enter on that.
And the choices under captions are description, caption is under captions, and then description.
So you only have two choices there, caption and description.
And if you are blind and you have to do a book with pictures, you can actually go ahead and use AI to put some quick and dirty descriptions in there.
And believe me, I’ve done that quite a bit.
So I’ve used this caption style before.
Then underneath captions is headings.
And if I press enter on that, I get heading one, heading two, and heading three.
Now I’m going to press escape to go back to the main style menu.
I’m on heading.
I’m going to arrow down lists and then I can press enter on that and we have list one,
list two, list three, list four, list five, and we go back to list one. And of course those are
so that you can put lists in sort of an outline order. You can put lists under lists. I pressed
escape. I’m back on lists. I’m going to hit the down arrow and now I’m looking at poetry. And you
think how often will I have to transcribe poetry but you wouldn’t you’d be surprised I use poetry
a lot for for recipes and things where you don’t want the first line indented and so
under poetry we have poetry one level poetry two level poetry three level poetry four level and
poetry five and there are some menus under each of them which I won’t go into I’m going to press
escape again and I’m on poetry I’m going to down arrow and we have glossary and under glossary
is glossary one glossary two glossary three glossary four glossary five so again you can have
an umbrella a lot of this is going to look the same your poetry your glossary your list
levels but the idea is that you’ve tagged them so you have added formatting to them so what
they are and you may say hey I’m not gonna do all that and and I can
understand if you’re at home or just brailling something casually you don’t
need to do all that but this is a full featured program for your Braille
transcriber okay under glossary we have exercise I’m gonna go down there we have
directions and we have another direction style it’s called direction 7-5 and we
We have exercise one, exercise two, and exercise three.
And then it goes back to directions.
Then we have index, and I’m not gonna go under it.
It’s the same idea.
The idea is that you can put various indentation levels into an index.
And then we have numeric again, so you can create a numeric list.
Notes, which is, let me look under there.
Incidental note with heading.
Incidental note without heading.
Footnote.
So there’s just so much power in here if someone is actually trying to transcribe and make sure everything is accurate.
There’s also entry for plays.
So if you were transcribing a play.
And then there’s a miscellaneous menu.
And under that is alphabetic division, attribution, source citation, guide words, page, transcriber’s notes, boxes.
So, wow, anything pretty much you would want to tackle.
The formatting’s already been figured out for you.
You won’t have to do it manually.
You basically pick the thing and choose a style, and the formatting’s done.
And so it really saves anyone doing Braille a huge amount of time.
And in my job, I get a lot of this where people think Braille is like print.
So my boss will come in and say, well, we have a blind visitor who’s coming to our conference
today and he needs all the handouts in Braille.
So just print them up for us.
it’s not like you just like throw something at a printer
and it comes out looking good.
You’ve got to go in and format it and fix it up.
I hate when that happens because people really don’t have a clue.
And so BrailleBlaster has actually made it a lot easier for me when these last minute requests come in.
So let’s see. Do we have any more hands? Let’s wait a second and see if we get some.
We do have hands. So first up is Marcy.
Marci:
Hi, Debra. Thank you so much for doing this presentation for us.
What other embossers have you used with BrailleBlaster besides the Romeo that you mentioned in your presentation?
Deborah:
Well, let’s see. So I’ve used a Braille Blazer. I have a Braille Blazer that is 30 years old. It still works. 34 characters on a line. I have an Index Basic Db5 at work. I used to have an Index Basic Db3 until it died. It’s so funny when it died, it kept going out of paper, out of paper, and we couldn’t shut it up. That’s another story.
I used it with a Versapoint. We had an ancient Versapoint here at work, and I used it for a while, and I miss it. Someone stole it. I mean, I think another department stole it. I have no idea where it went. And I know someone really well who uses it all the time with a Juliet. So I guess those are the embossers I’ve tried or know of.
Marci:
And so when we set up the embosser, we should set up the embosser to work with the computer first and then do the BrailleBlaster working with that particular embosser, right?
Deborah:
Yeah, well, what you have to do is install the drivers for the embosser if it’s a modern one or if it’s an old funky guy like my BrailleBlazer or the Romeo.
Then what I did is I set up the text-only print driver and then it will go to that.
So, yeah, in fact, I actually, and I can send it to you.
I have a whole article I wrote, and it’s actually in our very first Bits Bulletin on how to use the DOS print command in Windows 10 and 11 with an old Braille embosser.
Marci:
Excellent. Again, thanks again for doing the presentation.
Deborah:
You’re welcome. Any other hands?
Yes, we have Steve.
Steve:
Hi, thanks again. For me, a great presentation.
I have been using BrailleBlaster,
really haven’t been using it to its full capacity.
One of the issues I’m having is not being able to edit
when you’re in the Braille view,
which you could do in Duxbury.
And I’m wondering, is there any way to do that now?
Or do you have to edit?
You said you did most of your editing in the print view.
And the reason is the problem is sometimes I’ll have,
when you’re in the print view,
the italics and different symbols don’t show up.
And then I wonder why a line is only partway over on a page because I’ve got all these extra symbols that I’m not seeing
in the print view. And that’s been a real frustration.
Deborah:
I’m 90% sure you cannot. It’s a feature that people have asked for, though. I’ve seen that
so just keep bugging them. The developers eventually get to fix it. For a long time,
my Romeo didn’t work right with BRailleBlaster and I kept bugging them about it. So eventually they get around to it, I guess. My solution has been if I have to edit
I actually save it as a BRF and I pull it up in Notepad and I edit directly using my Braille display to read it.
But you can also use those six key dot things, PerkyDuck, BrailleZephyr.
And it even has a six key mode, though.
That’s weird because I haven’t been able to edit.
I think that’s only in the print if you have to make corrections to the translation.
And I’ve not been able to figure out any way to edit a BRF file.
I’ve been able to emboss them.
In fact, I have the, I forget what they call it.
It’s actually a plug-in for Word,
Quick Braille or something like that.
And it’ll emboss a BRF file,
but I have no way to edit it once I’ve got it as a BRF file.
I had this problem because I had a blind student
who needed her handouts in Braille,
but she couldn’t read punctuation
and she could only read grade one.
So I had to edit everything get rid of all the punctuation.
And I just edit them in Notepad.
I pull up a BRF in Notepad and I just edit.
Steve:
And the only problem I see with that is, again, the italics things don’t show up in different things.
So I wonder, too why is a line so short, whatever.
But I hear what you’re saying.
I guess I’ll just keep bugging them.
But it’s a great product for a free product.
I used Duxbury for years when I was working.
I’ve been too cheap to pay for it on my own.
I’ll bug them, too, about it, though.
Deborah:
It isn’t something I need to do because I actually like editing the
BRF file directly in Notepad.
I mean, you can contact me off list and send me a BRF file that has the problem
and I’ll take a look at it and see if there’s an easier way to deal with it.
Okay.
Sounds good.
Thanks.
All right.
This is the last call for hands.
One, two, three.
Hi, this is Mary.
Yeah.
Is this only about the BrailleBlaster or is this about any Braille technology?
Deborah:
I originally told people I was going to talk about BrailleBlaster, but
Somehow when the blurb for this presentation was written, they implied it was for all braille technology, but you couldn’t do that in an hour anyway.
Mary:
Well, I had a question about something different.
Deborah:
Well, you can give it a try.
We have a couple of minutes.
Mary:
I just recently purchased a Brilliant 20 BI from HumanWare.
And I’m using the edit keypad because I’m really not wanting to do braille files right now.
when I haven’t, I haven’t stored anything yet or haven’t, you’re like try to translate it or anything. But when I’m, I noticed when I go through a lot of the
contracted Braille, when I have it on the character for reading the character
or whatever, if it does read the character, it doesn’t say the exact like ED or whatever the Braille contraction.
Deborah:
So you’re saying that the speech is not saying exactly
the same thing you’re seeing in braille and keypad on the brilliant is that what you’re saying
in the edit keypad in but yes in keypad that’s the name of the application i have a brilliant
in fact i’m looking at right now.
Mary:
but my question is i mean i haven’t stored anything i haven’t
translated to a thumb drive or anything when i do that would it translate into print letters
with the contracted braille into the print letters,
or would it translate into the computer symbols?
Deborah:
Okay, so when you are editing in the Brilliance keypad editor,
as opposed to Keybraille, which is the braille editor,
when you’re editing in keypad, if you save it, it’s going to be a text file.
Okay.
So the only thing that’s in braille quote is what it’s showing you on the display.
If you’re typing actually text, you may be typing Braille, but internally it’s translating it immediately into text.
Okay, so at any point, if you were to save it, what you’d have is a text file.
You would not have a Braille file. You would have a text file.
So don’t worry about what the speech says, because speech doesn’t always accurately represent what’s being shown on a Braille display.
That was true of an old Braille and Speak, too. the Braille and Speak really didn’t do Braille.
You were just able to type in Braille and it would attempt in speech to tell you what you were typing.
But it made mistakes, too.
Mary:
Oh, yeah, definitely did.
Deborah:
Yeah, it was a text based device.
It just made it easy for you to enter the data in Braille.
And this is what’s happening with keypad.
It’s a text editor.
It’s basically notepad.
But when you’re typing, you’re typing using Braille symbols and the display is showing you Braille.
I hope that makes sense.
Yeah, thank you.
You’re welcome.
Tyson:
Thank you, first of all, Debra, for giving this presentation today.
A lot of good information out there.
And hopefully it was good information for all of you listening to us today.
Go out there and grab the software if you find it fits your needs.
Should you have any questions about this presentation, about other presentations,
or general questions and you need help, BITS is out here to help you.
And the address to get a hold of us is ask- @bits-acb.org.
And there you can type in there.
That will put you in touch with our mentor committee led by Marci Duty, who will get
and playing and all the good stuff that happens over on that side of the equation. Be ready to
here in three weeks on the second Saturday in February, where our next Basics with Bits will
focus on the Zoom Meeting Survival Guide, where we’ll have several of our Bits Zoom people. We’ll
be talking about how to work that and some of the questions that we’ve come across that a lot of
people have been asking for help with. Tune in then. If you need help, get in touch with us.
Again, ask@bits-acb.org. Thank you all for joining in with us and have an enjoyable rest
of your weekend. Thank you so much.