News

5 Connell Street, Limavady, Londonderry, BT49 0EA

Braille enthusiast Mary Lea is hosting a braille-themed event at Limavady Library on Wednesday 19 February 2025.

Children from local primary schools will visit from 2:00 PM, and secondary school children and other interested people from 3:00 PM.

The event will provide a hands on introduction to braille, with a Perkins brailler on show, plenty of examples of writing systems and books, braille stickers and name badges, and braille moulds for arts and crafts.

For more information, please contact us and we will put you in touch with Mary.

The Australia & New Zealand Accessible Graphics Group is pleased to invite you to an open online discussion about Refreshable Graphics Displays. The meeting will provide an opportunity for people who have tried these new devices to share their experiences, and for those who are curious to learn more. We hope you can join us on Thursday 13 February from 4-6pm Melbourne/Sydney time (AEDT). Registrations are required via https://monash.zoom.us/meeting/register/zddsBvmGQnyk-E_gXTJ4vw

In tonight’s final installment of Braillecast Live, we’re delighted to be joined by two further sponsors of our recent World Braille Day event:

At 7:00 PM, Andrew Flatres from HumanWare will bring us up-to-date with the Monarch, Text-To-Speech on the Mantis and much more.

Then after a short break, around 8:30 PM, join Paul Hopkins from All Formats to find out what it’s like to be a blind braille transcriber, and hear more about this social enterprise within QAC.

Register for Braillecast Live.

To join by phone, please use these details:

• Phone number: 0131 460 1196
• Meeting ID: 859 7317 7463
• Passcode: 123456

Friend of the Braillists Paul Hopkins recently wrote a blog post about our recent World Braille Day conference in Worcester. Read it here.

With thanks to All Formats and QAC for being one of the sponsors of the event.

If you attended our recent World Braille Day conference, we hope you found the day valuable and enjoyable. It was wonderful to meet so many of you in person.

We would greatly appreciate your feedback to help us improve our events, and we would like to thank those of you who have completed the form already. Even if you were unable to attend, we still welcome your thoughts, as your input will help shape the direction of future Braillists events. Please take a few moments to complete our feedback survey.

Thank you once again for your support and involvement in the Braillists community. We look forward to hearing your thoughts and seeing you at future events.

The Library of Congress in the US has recently updated its web page on Braille Ready Format.

Among the updates are several references to our masterclass, What is a BRF and Why would you Want One? presented by Matthew Horspool in 2021.

We posted last year about the EBU Braille Working Group’s initiative to post one piece of content a day for Braille200.

Find the contributions here.

We have been asked to share this link about a new publication on braille music.

My name is Fiona and I work at the Helix Centre – a research studio based at Imperial College London. I am doing a project with Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust to understand how they can improve the accessibility of outpatient appointments at their hospitals. We want to hear the experience of people who had appointments at St Mary’s, Charing Cross, Hammersmith, Queen Charlotte’s and Chelsea and the Western Eye Hospitals in the last 12 months and whether we communicated about their appointment in their preferred format.

We are particularly interested in chatting with people whose preferred communication and information format is Braille as we would like to understand how we could improve their outpatient experience. We will be carrying out 1-hour chats either over the phone or in-person to hear their experience and will provide them with a £25 gift voucher for participants.

I have shared below some information about the project that may be helpful.

Project summary:

Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, who run the Western Eye, Charing Cross, Hammersmith, St Mary’s and Queen Charlotte’s and Chelsea hospitals want to improve their outpatient services and how they communicate with patients.

We want to speak with people who had an outpatient appointment at one of our hospitals in the last 12 months and are blind or visually impaired. We would arrange to have a 60-minute chat with you over the phone or in-person to talk about your experience finding out about and attending your outpatient appointment.

You would receive a £25 voucher as a thank you for your time.

If you are interested, please contact us by phone on 07561 873711 or email [email protected] to register your interest.

You can find out more information about the project on the Trust website.

Kind regards,
Fiona O’Driscoll | Policy Fellow (she/her)
Helix Centre, Institute of Global Health Innovation, 3rd Floor, Paterson Building, 20 South Wharf Road, St Mary’s Hospital, London W2 1PE, UK

Warm greetings from Saigon, Vietnam!

Before discussing the release of Sao Mai Braille 24.12, we would like to share two pieces of information that might interest you:

• We organized a regional conference on employment for visually impaired individuals in Hanoi on December 3-4, 2024.
• A recording and accompanying handout introducing the music translation feature of SMB by Mr. James Bowden for the Sound Without Sight project are now available.

Now, back to the news about Sao Mai Braille.

Enhancing math editing functions is the key highlight of this release, including: reading and writing HTML and MS Word DOCX files with equations, integrating a new math editor, and converting LaTeX and MathML into native codes to display them as objects. Additionally, two other notable features are the ability to OCR text written in multiple languages and the option to play notes in music navigation mode.

Read further below for more details, or visit the SMB’s main page to download it.

MS Word and HTML Math Support

SMB supports opening, reading, and editing MS Word DOCX documents that contain mathematical expressions. Conversely, SMB also allows saving documents with mathematical expressions as DOCX files, which can be fully read and edited directly in the MS Word program. Similarly, SMB supports reading and saving HTML files containing mathematical expressions.

Integrated Math Editor

In addition to using the current dialog box for inserting expressions, SMB now includes a math editor, enabling faster and more intuitive input of mathematical expressions.

To input an equation from a print document, press Alt+= (equal sign) or choose “Open Editor” from the Math submenu of the Tools menu. A math editor window will be displayed, and the focus will be in the Expression edit field.

There are “Symbols” and “Structure” tab pages where you can select math operators and templates by category. Use the Tab key to move between controls, the arrow keys to browse options in each control, and Enter to activate.

From the menu bar, you can access many other functions, such as opening and saving equations in different file types, setting equation properties, inserting matrices, formatting, etc.

Press Ctrl+Q to close the math editor and insert the equation into the document. Alternatively, press Alt+F4 or choose “Exit” from the File menu to close without inserting the equation.

LaTeX and MathML CONVERSION Support

You can copy the LaTeX or MathML code of an equation and paste it into the Expression Edit field in the equation insert dialog. SMB will automatically convert it into SMB’s native math code.

You can also use the Paste Special function and choose “Math” to paste the code directly into the print document. SMB will automatically convert it into an equation. The keystroke for Paste Special is Ctrl+Shift+V.

For documents containing both text and equations written in LaTeX code (typically surrounded by dollar signs) and MathML (enclosed with tag), you can open such a document or paste its content into SMB’s print document window. Then, select the document and press Alt+\ (backslash) or choose “Convert to Equation” from the Math submenu under the Tools menu. This will search for and automatically convert LaTeX codes into equation objects.

OCR Support for Multiple Languages

To recognize text from scanned images, set the OCR languages first by going to the “Recognize” menu, opening the “Languages” submenu, and selecting the desired languages. If your scanned document contains multiple languages, select all relevant languages.

Next, from the “Recognize” menu, choose “Recognize” to OCR the current page or “Recognize All” to OCR the entire document.

Please refer to the user guide for more information on how to scan and download additional OCR languages.

Play Notes in Music Navigation Mode

To enable this music navigation mode, at the music score, press Shift+F5 or go to the View menu and select “Navigation Mode.” When the Music Navigation window opens, focus will be on the Braille field. Press Tab to navigate through the fields in the dialog box. Two new options are available:

• Play Sound: If enabled, it plays notes while navigating the score. Otherwise, notes are played only when the Space key is pressed.
• Speak Text: If enabled, screen reading software will describe the notes audibly. Otherwise, the note description text will not be displayed on the screen or spoken by the screen reader.

Please note that the music navigation mode is an experimental feature and may still have some issues and limitations.

Other Updates

• Updated to LibLouis 3.32.0, adding 25 new Braille translation tables for text.
• Added a “Keystrokes” item in the Help menu, which provides a summary of SMB’s keyboard shortcuts.
• Change the default translation table selection interface in the Options dialog. Remove the file name edit field and the browse button for selecting the language and grade of contraction of the default table. Instead, replace it with a direct dropdown list to select the default translation table.
• Fixed an issue where the non-installed version running from the system drive could not locate necessary folders.
• The installer now includes an option to install SMB for the current user only or for all users.