E-mail your text and get it back as sound in seconds

When the Frenchman Louis Braille invented Braille in 1821, it signalled a revolution for all the world’s blind. At a stroke they were able to read just as if they were normally sighted. Provided that...

BY JACOB BENTHIEN

Because naturally there were obstacles along the way. Someone had to produce and ’translate’ to Braille. It was arduous, slow work. And the amount of material worth reading in Braille is also modest. With sound recorders, yet another advance was taken, and the sophistication by means of digitalisation and computer technology is today raising blind people’s reading to the level of the normally sighted.

This is particularly due to the small Danish IT company Sensus, which received the prestigious Social Contribution Award 2007 from the British Computer Society, in sharp competition with projects from companies including Microsoft and IBM. Sensus received the prize for its e-mail-based RoboBraille project. RoboBraille is a computer programme which converts any text to either Braille or synthetic speech in a few seconds. A blind person can simply e-mail any form of text document to one of Sensus’ servers. A few seconds later, back comes the document either as a sound file or for printing out in Braille on the special Braille printer.

“It is actually quite a complex process which requires both computer power and knowledge,” says Lars Ballieu Christensen, who is the leading light behind RoboBraille. He has further developed the project since 2004 so that now, in addition to Danish, it has been adjusted to language versions in English, Italian, Portuguese, French, Lithuanian and Greek.

HELPING TO FIGHT ILLITERACY

“Part of the reason why we received the Social Contribution Award is probably that our RoboBraille service is open and free for all non-commercial users,” says Lars Ballieu Christensen. “But since we also have to survive, we sell our services to for example the pharmaceutical industry, which is required to label their packaging with Braille. We have developed a very special system that automates and standardises an otherwise very arduous operation.”

But despite the enthusiasm for the cause of the blind, there were not that many Braille readers even at pan-European level to give the project a critical mass. Until Lars Ballieu Christensen thought of both the visually impaired and the dyslectic. With these as ’customers’ for especially the synthetic speech, the number of users has swelled by millions.

“Furthermore, a number of countries that are struggling with illiteracy have shown a major interest in the synthetic speech aspect of the RoboBraille project,” says Lars Ballieu Christensen. “The automation and easy accessibility of RoboBraille can provide a huge boost. Although an illiterate person still will be illiterate, that person no longer has to remain in the dark. A simple scanner and access to e-mail, and you are up and running.”

http://www.sensus.dk