Please contact me offlist if you think this would be useful.

Wed Apr 24 16:32:15 UTC 2019

The Duxbury Braille Translator, which produces many of the BRF files in the wild, produces all alphabetic characters in the contracted or uncontracted braille file in the uppercase range, 41H through 5AH. Capitalization is indicated by the rules for the use of single or multiple dot 6's, termination signs, etc. In addition, if the translator is going to output dot 4, 4-5, 4-5-6, ou sign, ow sign, er sign, These symbols will be represented as 40H or 5BH through 5FH. Displays and embossers running in six-dot mode will ignore this distinction, but embossers or displays that are in 8-dot mode will probably put a dot 7 under all of these characters. All of this is a consequence of the fact that we are trying to represent 95 printable characters with only 63 braille characters.
If Duxbury is asked to create a .bru (unformatted braille) file, lowercase range symbols between 60H and 7EH will be used within the formatting commands. 
I'm not sure what LibLouis outputs, but it faces the same issues when paired with a screen reader such as JAWS, NVDA, ORCA, VoiceOver, TalkBack, etc. 

Lloyd Rasmussen, Senior Staff Engineer
National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, Library of Congress
Washington, DC 20542   202-707-0535
http://www.loc.gov/nls/
The preceding opinions are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Library of Congress, NLS.

-----Original Message-----
From: blinux-list-bounces at redhat.com <blinux-list-bounces at redhat.com> On Behalf Of Linux for blind general discussion
Sent: Tuesday, April 23, 2019 6:16 PM
To: blinux-list at redhat.com
Subject: RE: Please contact me offlist if you think this would be useful.

Hi, John.

I must be missing something here.  I read lots and lots of Braille, including from Bard and Bookshare.  Indeed, Braille is my primary reading medium and has been for something over fifty years.  I've never known Bard BRF files to be in all uppercase--although I assume one would or should be if the print it was converted from itself was uppercase.  What am I getting wrong, if anything?

Thanks!

Al

-----Original Message-----
From: blinux-list-bounces at redhat.com [mailto:blinux-list-bounces at redhat.com]
On Behalf Of Linux for blind general discussion
Sent: Sunday, April 21, 2019 1:39 PM
To: Linux for blind general discussion <blinux-list at redhat.com>
Subject: Re: Please contact me offlist if you think this would be useful.

Hi Al,

It sounds like you are not a Braille reader. .brf files have all the letters in upper-case. They also have special indicartors to indicate capitalization. The upper-case is unpleasant to read on a Braille display, because the dot 7 sticks up continuously. Converting everything to lower-case loses nothing.

John

On Sun, Apr 21, 2019 at 08:22:40AM -0400, Linux for blind general discussion
wrote:
> Greetings!
> 
> I don't know that I'd use the program, but I understand the usefulness 
> of combining volumes and removing a lot of extra blank lines.  Why 
> does the program convert uppercase to lowercase, though?  (I'd 
> typically want to know what's capitalized and what's not in a book or
> magazine.)
> 
> Al
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: blinux-list-bounces at redhat.com
> [mailto:blinux-list-bounces at redhat.com]
> On Behalf Of Linux for blind general discussion
> Sent: Saturday, April 20, 2019 7:42 PM
> To: Linux for blind general discussion <blinux-list at redhat.com>
> Subject: Please contact me offlist if you think this would be useful.
> 
> Hello,
> 
> I have developed a program which makes books from the BARD website of 
> the National Library Service braille display friendly. It does the
following:
> 
> Combines all volumes into one file;
> Converts upper-case  to lower-case;
> Eliminates extra blanks at the ends of lines; Skips more than 1 blank
line.
> 
> The conversion program is written in C, so it should work oo Windows. 
> The command line for it uses the Linux cat command. I don't know of 
> anything equivalent on Windows.
> 
> Happy and blessed Easter,
> John
> 
> --
> John J. Boyer
> Email: john.boyer at abilitiessoft.org
> website: http://www.abilitiessoft.org
> Status: Company dissolved but website and email addresses  live.
> Location: Madison, Wisconsin, USA
> Mission: developing assistive technology software and providing STEM 
> services
>         that are available at no cost
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Blinux-list mailing list
> Blinux-list at redhat.com
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Blinux-list mailing list
> Blinux-list at redhat.com
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list

--
John J. Boyer
Email: john.boyer at abilitiessoft.org
website: http://www.abilitiessoft.org
Status: Company dissolved but website and email addresses  live.
Location: Madison, Wisconsin, USA
Mission: developing assistive technology software and providing STEM services 
        that are available at no cost

_______________________________________________
Blinux-list mailing list
Blinux-list at redhat.com
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list

_______________________________________________
Blinux-list mailing list
Blinux-list at redhat.com
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list