[g-a-devel] ANNOUNCE: Dots - A braille transcriber for GNOME

[Eitan Isaacson <eitan ascender com>]

Hello folks,

This is to announce the very early begining of Dots, a braille
transcriber program for GNOME. Dots aims to fill the niche of desktop
braille publishing. Providing easy conversion from rich document
formats to clean, embosser ready, literal braille. Dots can also be
used to format documents for comfortable online reading using a
refreshable braille display. An obvious priority will be good screen
reader (Orca) support.

Dots is powered by liblouisxml, a powerful braille transcribing
library. It is still in proof of concept stage. My hope is to quickly
have this gain traction and contributors, since I will not have much
time to work on this in the next few months. If this sounds like
something you want to help lead, let me know.

This is what Dots does today:
- Import MS Word files.
- Choose among many tables for different languages and contractions.
- Customize the braille output.
- Review the braille output.
- Save the output to an embosser-ready file.

Here is the bad news:
- Limited Orca testing.
- Requires the development branch of GTK+ (2.15).
- No interactivity, besides the initial import no editing can be done,
this will be the killer feature once it is implemented.
- Many bugs and missing features.
- No documentation whatsoever, only this announcement!

The code could be viewed, checked out, and forked here:
https://github.com/eeejay/dots/tree

Some screen shots could be viewed here:
http://www.getdropbox.com/gallery/280491/1/dots_screenshot?h=58a0fd

I hope to follow up with a screen reader screen cast soon.

Cheers!

Eitan.