A student project by Daniel Frampton, implementing Turing's Night Writer English-to-Braille project in Rails.
In the original Night Writer project, Ruby was exclusively used to create a command-line interface for input/output, taking in strings of English and outputting lines of zeros and periods to a file to resemble Braille. In this adaptation of that project, Rails will be used to create a web interface to handle input/output; Unified English Braille will be the standard for translation; and Unicode symbols for Braille will be used to display the results.
In addition to strengthening my Ruby and Rails skills, I hope to gain experience with translation/transliteration between languages and writing systems, which is an avid interest of mine. I also hope to use the website to draw attention to issues of accessibility and literacy as they pertain to to people with vision disabilities.
The major features planned for this project are:
- A web interface for inputting text and seeing the transliterated results in Braille.
- The ability to export the transliterated text to a file format that supports Unicode.
- 100% support for Grade I Braille.
- As much support as time allows for Grade II Braille (i.e., contractions) according to Unified English Braille rules.