Seeing Hands – A non-profit dedicated to promoting the independence, education, employment, and success of blind individuals, has dedicated its efforts in the project of Braille dictionaries.
In the era of quick digital communication with different translators and artificial intelligence a braille dictionary seems to be a quite a cumbersome way to work with data. But the digital translators and bots can not still give us the feeling of the full control of the wording we want to use, listing in several options of synonyms or antonyms offline, without a need to connect to the internet and having the whole book of hundreds of thousands of entries.
Thanks to this project, Braille dictionaries, we can enjoy not only whole dictionary translated into braille, but choose from many different options – different sizes of volumes and files to use within our braille displays for instance.
What is very useful for those, for whom the English is not a native language is the possibility to download the dictionaries in both contracted and uncontracted English.
All files are completely free to download in the BRF or EPUB or other formats, with a possibility to choose the size of the volumes and braille code table for the best user’s experience. Yes, it is very easy. Once the user have the braille display with an file built-in viewer and enough space for the dictionary, it cam be loaded into the braille display’s memory in the desired volume sizes and used in BRF format. For now, there are only English dictionaries, but Seeing Hands expects to move forward with this project and add more of them in the future. On the website of the Braille Dictionaries project of Seeing Hands you can find Wiktionary (large and concise with 1284214 words), Webster’s International Dictionary (1913 version), Basic English Thesaurus (from Wiktionary). The users need to be aware of the size of the files – the large Wiktionary can grow up to 420 MB of pure text.