Braille Becomes Electric: The Trials and Triumphs of Braille Translation Software

Abstract

When a person converts the text of a print document to braille, it is usually called transcription. When a computer program does the same thing, it is often called translation. Some people think translation is an ill-chosen term, since the term usually connotes changing text from one natural language to another, whereas braille--thanks to the genius of Louis Braille's original design--is not a separate language from print but rather an alternate way of writing the same text. There are a number of reasons described in this essay why early braille translation software came to use the term translation, and Louis Braille himself could not have imagined the ongoing controversies and neverending intricacies of translation when computers were first used to produce braille from print and vice versa. EARLY INNOVATIONS The first software for braille translation was developed in the 1960s, well over a century after Louis Braille first developed his code. The in-house program developed for the IBM 704 computer by the American Printing House in Louisville, Kentucky, progressed in its development through several research projects until the first commercial braille translation product for literary braille appeared in 1975 (Sullivan, 2008). In those early days, the hardware that was typically available for running such application programs afforded vastly less computing power than we enjoy, and often take for granted, today. At the time the translation program was being developed, it was not clear that the available computing power would be sufficient to create software that could implement the trickier rules of English Braille, American Edition (EBAE) with an acceptable degree of accuracy. Although some artificial intelligence researchers believed automated natural language translation, such as from Russian to English, was just another grant and a few years away, individuals who were familiar with the intricacies of literary braille knew that its code was written with human transcribers in mind, and understood that teaching a computer to anticipate and apply correctly the many rules referring to the sound or meaning of the text to be transcribed would be challenging to say the least. For example, could a computer be taught to decide if do in a text refers to the verb denoting action or noun indicating the musical note? EBAE requires that the two dos be brailled differently in contracted braille, the most widely used form of English braille in which many words and letter groups are written in a shortened form. In contracted braille, do the verb is reduced to the letter d. Despite the concern that computers cannot directly discern sound or meaning when translating braille, the need for at least partial automation was increasing rapidly in the 1970s. The trend of enrolling children who are blind in mainstream public schools, such as was seen in Atlanta around this time, created a need for rapid production of informal classroom materials in braille, which existing braille printers could not meet in a timely fashion. In addition, braille printing houses and braille producers required skilled braille transcribers to oversee the production process, and social and economic trends combined to make such transcribers ever harder to find. Under such conditions, the speed of braille production was of the greatest importance, and a low level of error was tolerated. The braille translation software developed in the 1970s was able to accurately translate braille in an expedient manner. The deeply intractable problem situations, subjects of considerable debate, turned out to be statistically infrequent. For example, do very seldom refers to the musical note except in text that is actually about music. The braille translation software, thus, was programmed to assume that do always referred to action. Exceptions to such rules needed to be handled by humans, who marked the text prior to translation or proofread it afterwards. …