A Direct TeX-to-Braille Transcribing Method

Abstract

The TeX/LaTeX typesetting system is the most widespread system for creating documents in Mathematics and Science. However, no reliable tool exists to this day for automatically transcribing documents from the above formats into Braille/Nemeth code. Thus, visually impaired students of related fields do not have access to the bulk of study material available in LaTeX format. We have developed a tool, named latex2nemeth, for directly transcribing LaTeX documents to Nemeth Braille, thus facilitating the access of blind students to Science. In order to support the extensive set of Mathematics symbols covered by TeX, we propose some new symbols based on the extension mechanisms of the Nemeth code.

Using NLG for speech synthesis of mathematical sentences

“…Since Braille is not a universal standard, different converters have been developed. The most widespread include conversion from LaTeX to Japanese Braille (Hara et al, 2000), to Nemeth code mostly used in English speaking countries (Papasalouros and Tsolomitis, 2015), to Marburg code mostly used in German speaking countries (Murillo-Morales et al, 2016) and from MathML to Spanish, French and Italian Braille codes (Soiffer, 2016). Nonetheless, Braille cannot support all the notations that can be expressed through LaTeX or presentation MathML (e.g., category theory, computational logic) and it has not a mechanism to introduce new notations hence the converters have a number of limitations.…”