Archive.org: Scanning a Braille Playboy | Hacker News Reader

Archive.org: Scanning a Braille Playboy

blog.archive.org

72 pointstripzilch8 comments

Amazing. Who knew archive.org is so many things doing?! Digitizing books with scanning centers that together add a new book every 90 seconds to the archive.

Also, I had no idea archive.org has such a beautiful book reading interface! (eg. http://www.archive.org/stream/keartonsnaturepi01kearrich)

A more relevant link to see the book reading interface: http://www.archive.org/stream/playboybraile00nlsu

Wow, their book reading interface is incredible! It's actually a real joy to read even the most uninteresting scribbles with that interface. Wow. Now THAT is a design ebook-readers (... or the file format) need to adopt.

Thanks! Our BookReader is open-source, if you would like to use it:

https://github.com/openlibrary/bookreader

Just curious: are there any visually impaired hackers hanging out on HN? I'd be interested to hear what software setup you use.

I'm curious if there are any methods they could use to scan and translate the typed Braille into written English, or language in which it is written.

Out of curiosity, I looked it up, and there are braille versions of many alphabets:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braille#Braille_for_other_scrip...

I wonder how many blind multilinguists exist (that can read braille in multiple languages) . I imagine there's a lot of character collisions between different braille alphabets, but I suppose it wouldn't be any more difficult than (visually) reading, say, English and Spanish, which have virtually identical alphabets.

Where are their scanning centers? The link (http://www.archive.org/scanning) said they have lots of them, but doesn't describe where. I assume I can't just show up and expect to get my books scanned, so I'd be interested to understand the process better. Can an individual participate or are they only working with their partners?

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