Liblouis is an open-source braille translator and back-translator. It features support for computer and literary braille, supports contracted and uncontracted translation for many, many languages (Arabic, Armenian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Ethiopic, Finish, French, Gaelic, German, Greek, Icelandic, many Indian languages, Italian, Kurdish, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovakian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Vietnamese, Welsh) and has support for hyphenation. New languages can easily be added through tables that support a rule- or dictionary based approach. Included are also tools for testing and debugging tables. Liblouis also supports math braille (Nemeth and Marburg). The formatting of braille is provided by the companion project liblouisxml.

Liblouis has features to support screen-reading programs. This has led to its use in two Open Source screenreaders, NVDA and Orca. It is also used in some commercial assistive technology applications such as from ViewPlus for example.

Liblouis is based on the translation routines in the BRLTTY screenreader for Linux. It has, however, gone far beyond these routines. It is named in honor of Louis Braille. In Linux and Mac OSX it is a shared library, and in Windows it is a DLL.

• Read our publications & presentation slides
• Consult the documentation, including download and installation instructions
• Subscribe to our mailing list here or chat with us on irc (irc://irc.oftc.net/liblouis).

News

Noteworthy changes in release 2.4.1 (2012-2-22)

New features

• Czech hyphenation table thanks to Jan Hegr
• Spanish grade 1 table provided by José Enrique Fernández del Campo and Juan Carlos Buño Suárez
• New tamil table thanks to Mesar Hameed

Braille Table Improvements

• Improvements to the Portuguese grade1 braille tables
• Updates and additions to Icelandic 8-dot braille table.
• Improvements to the uncontracted Spanish computer braille table.
• Improvements to the Norwegian braille table thanks to David Hole.

Noteworthy changes in release 2.4.0 (2012-01-31)

New features

• New Generic Farsi Grade 1 table: A new table for Generic Farsi Grade 1 braille has been provided by Mesar Hameed.
• Emacs mode for editing Braille tables thanks to Christian Egli

Braille Table Improvements

• Improvements to the French comp6 and comp8 braille tables
• Improvements to the Romanian braille table
• Improvements to the Generic Arabic Grade 1 table
• Improvements to the Czech tables thanks to Jan Halousek and to Jan Hegr

Article about John J. Boyer in the The DAISY Planet

The DAISY Planet for the month of April contains a interesting article about John J. Boyer and the Liblouis software suite.

older news