The historical development of automatic Braille production in Germany

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. There are several possibilities to produce the input. It is easy to have a secretary put the inkprint text onto a mediu m acceptable to the computer : punched cards, punched tape or magnetic tape. This does not require knowledge of Braille a t all. In addition it is to be expected that the community of computer users gets more and more interested in devices using inkprint texts as input as we see nowadays. There was hardly any commercial development for Braille output and therefore hardly anything was available on th e market at that time. First experiments to construct electric Braille writers for blind people and connect them as an outpu t device had encountered problems with the carriage return (as I could see at the institute of …