English Braille font for Wolfram Language?

[fs (Frank Scherbaum)]

I am collaborating in ethnomusicological research with a colleague who is blind and I want to generate graphics which can be printed on tactile paper, so that she can feel the graphics. In this context, I need to write text (e. g. in plot labels) in English Braille language. I can generate the Braille glyphs as graphics (see attached file), but I don´t know how to generate my own Braille font which could be used with any text such as the plot labels, etc. Help would highly be appreciated…

[seanc (Sean Clarke)]

There are tools for making your own fonts. If you search online, you can find them easily. I don’t think you really want to do that though. What you probably want to do is to use the Unicode characters for braille.

Explaining this is probably a multistep process depending on how familiar you are with this stuff.

Braille Patterns

Unicode lists braille characters from 10240 to 10495:

I don’t see an easy way to transliterate from the Latin alphabet into English braille. There are multiple kinds of transliterations as well. You would have to write a program to do this or use something to do the transliteration for you. That is, you’ll have to write out a mapping between “a”, “b”, “c” … and the braille characters above.

[fs (Frank Scherbaum)]

Thanks Sean, this solves my problem.

[kylek (Kyle Keane)]

Hi Frank, I would be very interested in learning more about your solution if would be willing to have a chat. My contact info is on my profile http://community.wolfram.com/web/kylek/home

[fs (Frank Scherbaum)]

Hi Kyle,
based on Sean´s suggestion and the information on the Braille Wiki page (https: // Braille ASCII - Wikipedia), I simply converted all text strings into Braille glyphs.

char2Braille[c_] := Module[{pos}, pos = Flatten[
     StringPosition[" A1B'K2L@CIF/MSP\"E3H9O6R^DJG>NTQ,*5<-U8V.%[$+X!&;:4\\0Z7(_?W]#Y)=", 
      ToUpperCase[c]]][[1]];
  If[pos <= 64, pos, None]]

string2Braille[text_] := 
 char2Braille[#] & /@ Characters[text] // FromCharacterCode[# + 10239, "Unicode"] &

I know that this is not a real translation into Braille, but it did what I needed (see attached file).

[Vitaliyk (Vitaliy Kaurov)]

@Kyle Keane if you develop anything related I’d be very interested in seeing it. Let me know or simply post on Community about your project. BTW, there is also useful function CharacterRange:

Multicolumn[CharacterRange[10240, 10495], 16]