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posted by martyb on Thursday November 02 2017, @03:30AM   Printer-friendly
from the BraileToSpeech++ dept.

A Kindle for the Blind:

For nearly a century, the National Braille Press has churned out millions of pages of Braille books and magazines a year, providing a window on the world for generations of blind people.

But as it turns 90 this year, the Boston-based printing press and other advocates of the tactile writing system are wrestling with how to address record low Braille literacy.

Roughly 13 percent of U.S. blind students were considered Braille readers in a 2016 survey by the American Printing House for the Blind, another major Braille publisher, located in Louisville, Kentucky. That number has steadily dropped from around 30 percent in 1974, the first year the organization started asking the question.

Brian Mac Donald, president of the National Braille Press, says the modern blind community needs easier and more affordable ways to access the writing system developed in the 1800s by French teacher Louis Braille.

For the National Braille Press and its 1960-era Heidelberg presses, that has meant developing and launching its own electronic Braille reader last year—the B2G .

Hope it catches on. We need somebody who can read the last copy of the Bible after the apocalypse.


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  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday November 02 2017, @08:37AM (2 children)

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Thursday November 02 2017, @08:37AM (#590929) Journal

    As far as I can tell, computers have removed the need for Braille. With the exception graphic designers that still think there is a need for images replacing text, computers and web browsers can easily read content off the internet. Even cheap smart phones can perform this ability

    Can you imagine ... oh, the horror... in this world, there are some hundred of languages, not all of them (I could even say most of them not) having a synthesized voice for screen readers.

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
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  • (Score: 2) by pendorbound on Thursday November 02 2017, @01:34PM (1 child)

    by pendorbound (2688) on Thursday November 02 2017, @01:34PM (#591000) Homepage

    Google understands 119 voices [www.blog.google] in speech-to-text. Presumably text-to-speech is easier and more supported. You need about 400 languages to cover 94% of the population [cmu.edu].

    I wonder how many of the 6900 languages are similar enough to each other that a TTS engine for one could muddle through several others. If you throw French at a Spanish TTS, it sounds funny, but I think you'd be able to understand enough of it to get by. Either that or you've got a Monty Python sketch in the making...

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 02 2017, @04:45PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 02 2017, @04:45PM (#591142)

      I wish to return this tobacconists. It is scratched.