Making the Digital Humanities More Open

FAIN: HD-51559-12

University of South Carolina Research Foundation (Columbia, SC 29208-0001)
George H. Williams (Project Director: October 2011 to April 2014)

The development of a tool to make digital texts in the humanities accessible to visually impaired readers by converting text into braille.

BrailleSC will undertake its second stage of development by designing and deploying a WordPress-based accessibility tool that will create braille content for endusers who are blind or low vision. Specifically, we plan to extend the use of Anthologize--a free and open source plug-in for WordPress that currently translates any RSS text into PDF, ePub, HTML, or TEI--to include the conversion of text to braille. As a result, we will not only make it easy for content creators to convert a text into braille, thereby extending humanities content to hundreds of thousands of visually disabled readers, but we will also experiment with making braille available visually through the WordPress interface. In partnership with the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland, College Park, we will continue to model the ways in which digital humanities projects should be designed and implemented with the needs of disabled users in mind.