Friday, May 3, 2013

A FOSS Devanagari to Bharati Braille Converter

Almost a year ago, I worked with Pooja on transliterating a Hindi poem to Bharati Braille for a Type installation at Amar Jyoti School; an institute for the visually-impaired in Delhi. You can read more about that on her blog post about it. While working on that, we were surprised to discover that there were no free (or open source) tools to do the conversion! All we could find were expensive proprietary software, or horribly wrong websites. We had to sit down and manually transliterate each character while keeping in mind the idiosyncrasies of the conversion.

Now, like all programmers who love what they do, I have an urge to reduce the amount of drudgery and repetitive work in my life with automation ;). In addition, we both felt that a free tool to do such a transliteration would be useful for those who work in this field. And so, we decided to work on a website to convert from Devanagari (Hindi & Marathi) to Bharati Braille.

Now, after tons of research and design/coding work, we are proud to announce the first release of our Devanagari to Bharati Braille converter! You can read more about the converter here, and download the source code on Github.

If you know anyone who might find this useful, please tell them about it!