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, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Finish, French, Gaelic, German, Greek, Icelandic, Italian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, 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 1.8.0 (2009-11-23)
This release contains a number of improvements notably the integration of gnulib, the automatic generation of man pages and the addition of tables for German grade 2.
New features
New tables
- Tables German Grade 2
- Swiss German
- Swedish (1989 standard)
- Swedish (1996 standard)
Modified tables
- Updated Norwegian tables
- Updated Chinese braille table
man pages
All tools accept the --version and --help options and are documented in man pages
Corpus based test cases for tables
You can now have corpus based tests for tables. See the README in tests/table_test_corpuses.
Bug fixes
- config.h is no longer exported
- Many small fixes
