RE: Braillists Forum: DAISY
Mary Ward
Here’s what my discussion was about. I would like to see some of the features currently available in DAISY formats also made available in Braille documents. Right now, in a brf formatted document, or a dxb formatted document, navigation units are extremely limited, sometimes ambiguous, and sometimes completely unavailable. Of course, it is quite easy to navigate by the length of the display, which might be 14 to 80 cells. This is the panning so familiar to all of us. Most displays and notetakers also allow us to navigate by other units, such as character, word, line, or paragraph. Some allow us to navigate by sentence. However, few of them let us define what is to constitute a paragraph for a given document. Will the paragraph be set off by two enters, a hard return, or a hard return followed by two spaces, as it is in Braille. We might be able to navigate by page, but we usually can’t specify whether we want to use Braille or print page numbers. Finally, we can’t move by heading or heading level. Moving by headings and being able to specify which level would be extremely helpful in books that have a table of contents. I can’t speak for anyone else, but for me, at least, the inability to actually make use of a table of contents is the biggest reason for not reading Braille documents. This is why I end up using speech on my computer, though I know that I really could use a display connected to my computer or iOS device. I feel torn between the intimacy and familiarity of Braille on the one hand and the ease of use of speech on the other.
Am I the only person who feels this way? Are there other people who would like to be able to expect just a few of the many useful features of print and even spoken documents in Braille? Why can’t we move in Braille documents by headings? Why can’t many of our notetakers be told that in a brf document, a paragraph may not be preceeded by two enters?
If I’m the only one, I will shut my big Texas mouth. Thanks for hearing me.
From: brail...@googlegroups.com [mailto:brail...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Mary Ward
Sent: Saturday, July 29, 2017 8:04 PM
To: brail...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Braillists Forum: New Member and Question
Hello. My name is Mary and I’m sweltering down here in Austin, Texas. I am writing to ask a question of other Braille readers, especially those who have been using Braille for a long time. But it’s a long question, so I will just introduce myself here and put the question in another email. It’s good to be with Braille users across the pond
I am probably older than you, and I have an interesting Braille history. I taught Braille for a couple of years in Ecuador back in the eighties. For newly blinded or uneducated adults, a sheaf of loose Braille pages got handed to the student, who returned them so they could go to the next person. The sheaf of papers had been written on a Perkins or slate. I learned what passed for Spanish Grade 2 in Ecuador using these sheets. No, my Spanish wasn’t really all that great. I just had to stay a step ahead of the students.
Sadly, I don’t remember if I made more copies of the pages, but I hope that I made good use of my Perkins. I really wish I had left it down there. Braillers were in short supply. But I didn’t trust the staff of any of the schools to make good use of it. They had a habit of putting nice things in the closet to bring out only when important officials came to visit. So I ended up taking my Perkins back home.
Children were taught using embossed books from Mexico, but we had no primer for actually learning the Braille alphabet. So the sighted teachers usually just told the kids to write, thus avoiding the necessity to actually prepare material and write lessons by hand for each student. But since the students had no pattern to base their Braille writing on except for blocks and other teaching tools, they were not very successful in this endeavor. I frequently asked the sighted teachers if they thought that sighted children could learn print without ever having seen any writing not their own, but I didn’t get very far with this line of reasoning.
In that school, the third grade teacher was also blind, so he and I created materials for the kids after class so they could read something other than their incorrect writing. So they actually learned both Braille and the alphabet in third grade. They would crowd around either one of us and ask question after question about Braille, about other subjects, about the world.
Those were the days!
So now I’m just an old colonial soldier boring everyone with her old war stories. But I still love Braille.
Thanks for letting me join.
I don’t know what happened to any of the kids, so I hope at least some of them moved on with their education.
Back in the nineties, electronic Braille became possible for regular Braille readers and writers. As we gained access to displays and embossers, we found that we could get our hands on more Braille than ever. These days, I use electronic Braille much more often than I use hard copy.
So here’s my question. Am I the only one who feels like progress pretty much stopped? We are still reading Braille in a modified ASCII text format. We can read regular word processor documents in Braille, and with care, we can even edit them. We can make use of features these documents might have, such as headings. But in actual Braille files, the ones with the brf extension, we cannot make use of headings, lists, links, or any of the other features so familiar to us in documents used by our sighted peers.
Am I the only person who longs to move through a table of contents in a brf or dxb file? Would anyone else like to use their stand-alone Braille device to move through a table of contents and actually link to the desired chapter or section? Would anybody else like to have Braille files that actually contain tables and can be navigated that way? Is there a need to bring Braille into the new century, or is it enough to just rely on standard print formats if we want to use sophisticated features and move by different elements? Should we just forget about using dedicated Braille notetakers if we expect to have access to these elements, always using the display function of the Braille device instead of using the notetaker’s word processor? I’m finding that for writing down notes, and sometimes for reading, I’m comfortable reading and writing in my native Braille, without having to check for translation errors all the time, even in notes to myself. But I’m finding that the comfort of native Braille comes at an increasingly higher cost. Right now, it’s irrevocably stuck in DOS. Do I need to just bite the bullet, or are there others who want a more sophisticated, feature-laden Braille?
I know that I am talking about limitations that come from several sources.
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E M Rogers
> Here’s what my discussion was about. I would like to see some of the
> features currently available in DAISY formats also made available in
> Braille documents. Right now, in a brf formatted document, or a dxb
> formatted document, navigation units are extremely limited, sometimes
> ambiguous, and sometimes completely unavailable.
> extremely helpful in books that have a table of contents. I can’t
> speak for anyone else, but for me, at least, the inability to actually
> make use of a table of contents is the biggest reason for not reading
> Braille documents.
design. We wanted to support chapters (i.e. navigation by headings), but
our chosen formats, BRF and PEF, don't readily support that.
Reading headings in the former, BRF, in a computational way (e.g. to
generate tables of contents) would require clever and likely unreliable
reading of the formatting (e.g. if its centred then its a heading). Too
much effort and too likely to give the wrong results.
Reading headings in the latter, PEF, which uses XML and unicode Braille
codes, is far more viable. XML allows heading 'nodes' (marking the text
as a heading something like, "<heading>Heading 1</heading>"). But even
then we couldn't examples of files that take advantage of this.
The DAISY Consortium could be the people to back richly formatted PEF in
stead of BRF. BRF and PEF can be converted between with a simple script,
so there shouldn't be any compatibility issues.
The Braillists Foundation could conceivably look into this as a project,
if someone with an understanding of computer formats is prepared to lead
it.
Ed
E M Rogers
navigation formatting on PEF;
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# Why Use XML?
PEF uses XML because:
- It allows metadata. A PEF file can contain information about its
contents.
- It is extensible. New features can easily be introduced in future
versions, such as ink overlay or tactile graphics. Third party custom
features such as heading or paragraph markers are also possible via
namespace additions.
- XML tools are widely available and easy to use. No parsing or
validating tools need to be developed to implement PEF.
- It allows structural markup. Following XML convention, PEF uses
markup rather than control characters for structural elements such as
rows and pages. Structural markup simplifies processing in an XML
environment and ensures compatibility with future extensions.
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In other words, if someone were to propose an extension of the PEf
format, and a convenient extension for converting from BRF to PEF, there
might be some chance of improving this situation.
Ed
Mary Ward
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