On-Line Braille store
is now open
The Research and Production team at ReadHowYouWant has invested considerable time
and energy to developing systems for creating Braille files that are:
- Accurate
- Low cost
- Available quickly, and in most cases at the same time as the materials are published
- Adequately contracted, so that it has an acceptable length
The process is done in three stages:
- Checking is done prior to Braille conversion – the text is checked to make sure
it is accurate. The XML file is also checked to ensure it is accurately marked up
into XML.
- The text is converted to Braille.
- The Braille is formatted.
ReadHowYouWant is developing a house style for Braille that can support automated
transcription while maintaining accuracy.
These books are transcribed using the Carnegie Mellon Dictionary, and only the words
found in it are contracted. Therefore any place names, foreign words, proper names,
company names, and trademarks not in this dictionary are not contracted. Words which
are not in the dictionary and could be pronounced differently in different countries
are not contracted either. Words in the Braille text are not split across lines
at line ends because this makes reading more difficult, it may exclude newer Braille
readers and the benefits in terms of page reduction are minimal. A book which is
originally in British English will not be edited into American English so it will
be Brailled as it is in print. In the print edition, if any word has been hyphenated
at the end of a line for typesetting reasons, we will remove the hyphens in any
of these words. If a joined contraction occurs across a page break, it will be put
on the following page e.g. if "to" is on one page and "the" is on the next--the
contracted "to" will be attached to "the" on the next page. If words are capitalized
in the beginning of a chapter or section, we have purposely left the words capitalized
because we have located some instances where it could be misleading to present these
words in lower case. Making the decision will require manual intervention which
will be expensive, and may require knowledge of the content that the editor may
not have. The dividing of a book into volumes is being done automatically. The process
works but the place chosen to start the next volume can be improved and will be
addressed in a later version of the software.