Robo Braille!

[kestrell]

Disappointingly, this is not a swarm of nanotech braille dots which create clouds of braille in the air, allowing blind people to add braille labels to . anything which strikes their fancy, kind of a secret language like the hobo symbols.

It also doesn't allow me to convert brf files to txt. There seems to be about a dozen programs for sighted people to convert other file types to brf, but none that seem to go the other way round. Is it assumed that blind readers will only want to read such ebooks on their very special devices?

Comments

[bibliofile]

That's kinda wacky. I expect that simply no one has thought of the brf file converstion because the other need seems more immediate. How many books start out in brf format?

[kestrell]

I did find a couple of posts of other blind people asking this question, and there is an old DOS converter with a Windows interface that still requires you know DOS (I don't remember how to give a file a DOS-acceptable filename), but there could also be another issue.

"Special formats" and "special devices" are intentionally designed to not be usable on mainstream devices, since special libraries want to be able to assure publishers that special format ebooks for blind people won't end up being converted to a standard file type and pirated on the Net. If I was a hacker, this would hold me up for about five minutes, but I'm just a user, so it's kind of annoying that I can only read my special format books on my special player.