Bangla Braille Adaptation

Abstract

Braille, a tactile writing system, is used by visually impaired and partially sighted people for reading and writing in everyday life. Visually impaired persons in Bangladesh are deprived of basic education due to inadequate textbooks and sufficient reading materials written in Bangla Braille. This is widening the knowledge gap and disparity within the society with progress of time. In order to improve this scenario, an automated information system for facilitating machine translation of Bangla text to readable and recognizable Braille code is essential. In this book chapter, a detailed research on Bangla Braille has been accomplished and necessary grammatical rules as well as conventions are identified for rule-based Bangla Braille translation. Through the analysis of investigations, a computational model is proposed using Deterministic Finite Automata (DFA) for the machine translation. The proposed DFA demonstrated very acceptable conversion, which is validated by the visually impaired community. Based on the computational model, another software architecture is also proposed for the implementation of machine translation of Bangla to Braille using open source technology. The translator is tested with Bangla Unicode-based text contents, and the generated Braille code is validated after printing in the Braille printer. The performance of the conversion of Bangla to Braille code has been found accurate and also free from grammatical errors.