Member Detail: American Printing House for the Blind

The American Printing House for the Blind (APH) was established in 1858 and manufactures braille, large print, audio, computer disk, and tactile graphics, together with a variety of educational and daily living products.

APH is using a specialised DTD (Document Type Definition) to find a solution to a long-standing problem with creating text books in two or more accessible media. The company is writing software that lets it use one source file to create both a large print and a braille version of a textbook. The DTD is, of course, able to work with digital audio, too, and APH will produce some recorded books using this media.

The software APH is writing is called Book Wizard, and it will be available both as a reading tool and a tool to actually create the books. The braille component dynamically translates the file and handles exceptions to general translation rules by letting the transcriber and/or editor mark exceptions. This permits continual editing without having to store a separate file for contracted braille.