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RoboBraille – a European Braille and Speech Translation Service
RoboBraille is an e-mail based service that translates written documents to and from Braille or synthetic speech.
The primary group targeted for this service is the visually impaired and other print-impaired readers. Commercial users from pharmaceutical, financial and public sectors constitute the second target group for RoboBraille. With the financial support of the European Commission within the framework of eTEN programme, the Danish RoboBraille service is currently being tested in Ireland, Portugal, Italy, Cyprus and the United Kingdom.
The initial response from end-users as well as from potential commercial users has been very positive, and the RoboBraille service has received considerable publicity, mainly through national TV and radio broadcastings in the United Kingdom as well as in Denmark. For instance, RoboBraille project was presented on BBC News web site giving an overview of the Electronic Braille System and it has also been invited to participate in the annual Festival of Research in Denmark. RoboBraille was also twice featured in BBC Radio 4 in the InTouch programme in February and March with some 3-400,000 listeners, and in April in the European InSight radio channel; a pan European radio channel broadcasting especially for the blind and partially sighted in Europe. They have also been on regional and national news (TV) in Denmark, and had editorial coverage in a number of broad sheet newspapers in Denmark.
The prominent French organization for the blind, AVH, has decided to donate French speech synthesizers to the RoboBraille service. To utilize the French text-to-speech capabilities of RoboBraille, please submit documents to parlefrancais@robobraille.org. Similarly, the Lithuanian organization for the blind has donated Lithuanian speech synthesizers. Furthermore, RoboBraille enabled users to control the speech rate of audio files created by RoboBraille; by adding plusses or minuses to the subject line of the emails containing documents to RoboBraille, users can increase or decrease the speaking rate, ranging from +++ (fastest) to --- (slowest).
Despite of the service being only in a trial phase, it has already managed to raise great interest. The consortium leader, Lars Ballieu Christensen hopes that the service will be fully implemented next year. It is already planning to widen the number of countries, languages involved and to target a larger group of users.