Developed by European researchers, the RoboBraille service offers a unique solution to the problem of converting text into Braille and audio without the need for users to operate complicated software. “We started working in this field 20 years ago, developing software to translate text into Braille, but we discovered that users found the programs difficult to use – we therefore searched for a simpler solution,” explains project coordinator Lars Ballieu Christensen, who also works for Synscenter Refsnaes, a Danish centre for visually impaired children.

A free, e-mail-based service that translates text into Braille and audio recordings is helping to bridge the information gap for blind and visually impaired people, giving them quick and easy access to books, news articles and web pages.

The result of the EU-funded project was RoboBraille, a service that requires no more skill with a computer than the ability to send an e-mail. Users simply attach a text they want to translate in one of several recognised formats, from plain text and Word documents to HTML and XML. They then e-mail the text to the service’s server. Software agents then automatically begin the process of translating the text into Braille or converting it into an audio recording through a text-to-speech engine.

“The type of output and the language depends on the e-mail address the user sends the text to,” Christensen says. “A document sent to britspeech@robobraille.org would be converted into spoken British English while a text sent to textoparabraille@robobraille.org would be translated from Portuguese into six-dot Braille.”

The user then receives the translation back by e-mail, which can be read on a Braille printer or on a tactile display, a device connected to the computer with a series of pins that are raised or lowered to represent Braille characters.

RoboBraille can currently translate text written in English, Danish, Italian, Greek and Portuguese into Braille and speech. The service can also handle text-to-speech conversions in French and Lithuanian.

Christensen notes that the RoboBraille partners are constantly working on adding new languages to the service and plan to start providing Braille and audio translations for Russian, Spanish, German and Arabic. They are also working on making the service compatible with PDF documents and text scanned from images.

Up to 14,000 translations a day
At present, the service translates an average of 500 documents a day, although it could handle as many as 14,000. RoboBraille can return a simple text in Braille in under a minute while taking as long as 10 hours to provide an audio recording of a book. As of January, the RoboBraille system had carried out 250,000 translations since it first went online.

The team have won widespread recognition for their work, receiving the 2007 Social Contribution Award from the British Computer Society in December while in April they were awarded the 2008 award for technological innovation from Milan-based Well-Tech.

“We initially started offering the service only in Denmark but to make it viable commercially we needed to broaden our horizons. Hence the eTen project which allowed us to involve other organisations across Europe in developing and expanding the service, not only geographically but also in terms of users,” Christensen says.

In addition to the blind and visually impaired, the service can also help dyslexics, people with reading difficulties and the illiterate. The project partners plan to continue to offer the service for free to such users and other individuals, while in parallel developing commercial services for companies and public institutions.

The RoboBraille team, which recently received an €1.1m grant over four years from the Danish government, expect the service to be profitable within four or five years.

And although they are not actively seeking investors, they are interested in partnerships with organisations interested in collaborating on specific social projects.  RoboBraille was funded under the EU's eTEN programme for market validation and implementation.

The Project
The RoboBraille project offers a tool that automates the translation of text into Braille and speech. Users submit documents as attachments to e-mails. In return, they receive contracted Braille documents or MP3 files. The service is available free of charge to all non-commercial users.

RoboBraille is an email-based translation service capable of translating email attachments, e.g. Word documents, text files, HTML pages to and from contracted Braille and to synthetic speech. The eTEN RoboBraille market validation project aims to validate the commercial viability and user acceptance of the Danish RoboBraille translation service in five additional European countries: Ireland, United Kingdom, Italy, Portugal and Cyprus.

As society becomes increasingly dependent on literacy, the problem of textual information inaccessible to print impaired people is likely to grow. The RoboBraille service attempts to resolve this universal problem as it makes textual information accessible to people who would otherwise find it inaccessible due to disability or reading difficulties: the blind, partially sighed, dyslexic and others who find it difficult to read.

During the eTEN RoboBraille project, the RoboBraille service will be adapted into four additional languages (Braille and text-to-speech support for British English, Italian, Greek and Portuguese) before running pilots in each of the countries with a combined target of 900 sample users. The pilot phase is divided into two parts, and the consortium will use the results from the first part as well as any feedback from the midterm workshop to further adapt the service to meet the needs of the users.

The objectives of the market validation project are:
   * to analyse the market possibilities for the RoboBraille service in the 6 partner countries,
    * to run pilot tests on the RoboBraille service with some 900 users from the 5 new partner countries,
    * to prepare a business plan/deployment report on the conditions for initial deployment of the service and thereby enable and encourage initial deployment of the service.

Funded by:
    eTEN Total Cost: €1.12m
    EC Contribution: €0.56m

Participants:
Vestjaellands AMT Coordinator Denmark
[Contact: Lars Ballieu Christensen
E-mail: lbc@sensus.dk]
National Association of Housing for Visually Impaired Ltd. Ireland.
Royal National College for the Blind. UK
Associazione Nazionale Subvendenti. Italy
Associacao Portuguesa de Criatividade. Portugal
Pangypria Organosi Tyflon. Cyprus
The National Council for the Blind of Ireland. Ireland.
Project: http://www1.respekt.nu/websites/acj/robobraille.nsf
http://tinyurl.com/5gmxbz
Voice: http://www.sensus.dk/sb4/sb4amrsp/09-05-2998-114916.mp3http://tinyurl.com/3spvsl