The historical development of automatic Braille production in Germany
Helmut Werner · ACM SIGCAPH Computers and the Physically Handicapped · 1975
Automatic Braille production in Germany was initiated by a conversation between the blind teacher Erwin Manshol t from Hannover-Kirchr(xde and myself in 1962 .In a subsequent conversation we formulated the rules to be used, and w e agreed to demonstrate the principles of automatic Braille production to blind people by using Grade 1 translation only .I n doing so we hoped to avoid the difficulties arising in the full scale problem .Grade 1 uses essentially a one-to-one translation, except for some frequent German combinations such as st, sch and ie, which are contracted .They must not be used if the letters of such a sequence belong to different etymological parts of a compound word .Some of the problems that arise in Braille translation of Grade 2 are due to the fact that Braille uses a shorthand and this shorthand contains a number of contractions in order to save space .There are certain rules that govern the case s in which two different contractions collide with each other .There are certain rules of priority .These can be dealt wit h by introducing additional "pseudo contractions" that incorporate these rules of priority .Real problems arise, however, a s was pointed out above, if contractions are composed of letters that belong to different etymological parts of a word .During our work we learned very soon that there are two types of problems to be solved .I) The Hardware Problems, because it is not enough just to write a computer program for the translation .In order t o make practical applications it is necessary to pay particular attention to the input and output devices .