[duxuser] Re: Dilema, How to Train Sighted Staff to Do Braille using DBT

  • From: "Dale Leavens" <dleavens@xxxxxxx>
  • To: <duxuser@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Sun, 27 Apr 2003 17:07:18 -0400

I have not been following this thread too closely but I will interject a
comment.

Much as I like perfect braille, I do work as a blind person in an
essentially sighted environment, have held several jobs in the Health Care
industry. I suspect my needs are similar to those of many hundreds who,
after using perfect or close to perfectly transcribed text books to graduate
now need a high speed easily accessible low cost and reliable transcription
system to meet business and other information deadlines.

For me this means things like agenda, minutes, draft policy and procedures,
maybe course materials or hard copy of e-mail, Web research, appointment
schedules, the dozens of things my colleagues turn up at meetings with all
of the time.

Much of this stuff these days arrives electronically. It takes me way too
long to tidy it up to make it readable, when My assistant is available it
takes her time too and there is that teaching curve etc.

Now I don't need perfect braille but it would help if tables were
intelligently enough translated to insert a space between columns and a new
line between rows and some way to eliminate all that highlighting stuff that
sighted people seem to need in order to grasp any meaning from anything but
which turns up in the form of italic symbols all over the place in the
braille output and please dear God why must DBT regard the apostrophe as a
tilde character when importing? What possible purpose can that serve? Then
it insists on turning it into an open inside quotation mark when it
transcribes. I happen to be under the administration of a man called O'Mara.
Including the capitalization you should se the mess it makes of meeting
minutes!

Please do not misunderstand me, I am all in favour of perfect braille
transcription and it may be that there is another market for some of us less
discerning and lazier brailed readers who neither have the time or
inclination to memorize a variety of formatting codes to insert and pair off
and so on. We have had Hot Dots for that since around 1986. Believe it or
not, I still use Hot Dots by programmatically inserting those $ codes into a
text output file, call it with a .BAT file which selects the embosser
through a buffered printer switch so I can get predictable braille output
from a process either automatically or with a macro.

Are there any plans to give us maybe some V B A access to DBT objects as in
Word or WordPerfect? Didn't mean to go there, just thought of it.

Dale Leavens, Cochrane Ontario
dleavens@xxxxxxx
     Home of the Polar Bear Express!

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