News

First public release

August 7, 2024

What we have

Over the past couple months, we at Seeing Hands have been building Braille-oriented dictionaries. We are happy to announce that our work is now available for the public. This launch has many of the things that we wanted to get, but it's by no means the end of this project. We hope that you will find these dictionaries useful, and know that we're still working on more options, better formats, and more devices supported.

Where we're going

We already know some of the things that need to be on our roadmap for the near future. Here's a quick overview of what we hope to deliver soon.

• Dictionaries in languages other than English. We've got a lot of the groundwork done on the English versions, and it is time for this to come to speakers of other languages.
• Multi-line Braille support. This will take a bit more coding, but we'll get there.
• More dictionaries. It's not just for other languages. We only have a couple sources for English dictionaries, but we know that there are other good ones out there. There are copyright restrictions that have to be considered, but we will find other good sources and add them here.
• More devices supported. While our formats will work on most Braille displays out there, there are some devices where you'll need to select the format yourself. We're always looking to add to our suggestions to make the process of finding the right format as quick and easy as possible.
• Probably many other good ideas, but we won't know them until you tell us. Provide any questions or suggestions that you have using the contact link at the top of any page, and we'll add any feature we can to make these better.

Acknowledgements

First and foremost, we'd like to thank our team of testers. From the start of this project in May, we've had many testing versions to see how well certain formats work. A lot of where we are today is due to great feedback from them. To all of our 13-person testing team, we at Seeing Hands are grateful for your help.

We'd also like to thank the users on the Braille display users email list for starting us out on this project.