BrailleBlaster™ is a braille transcription program developed by the American Printing House for the Blind to help transcribers provide blind students with braille textbooks on the first day of class. Designed primarily for editing textbooks that meet the specifications published by the Braille Authority of North America (BANA), the purpose of BrailleBlaster is to help braille producers ensure that every student has his or her braille textbooks in a timely manner.
The BrailleBlaster editing tool offers braille transcribers a rapid means to:
- Translate braille accurately in UEB or EBAE
- Format braille
- Automate line numbered poetry and prose
- Split books into volumes
- Add transcriber notes
- Describe images
- Automate braille table of contents, glossaries, preliminary pages, and special symbols pages
- Automate a variety of tables
One of many features of BrailleBlaster is the Special Symbols Finder, which scans the entire transcription, identifies all special symbols, and inserts them appropriately into each volume.