OK, everyone else is doing it, so why not us? - WWW home paging, that is.

I got a hold of an HTML editor a couple of days ago and it is pretty slick. Fairly powerful and very intuitive to use, so I said to myself -- I bet I can do this. The editor is called 1-4-All HTML Editor It is shareware with a 60 day trial period.

HTML, I guess, is a subset of SGML, the big daddy of mark-up languages. Edie and I are familiar with ICADD, an even smaller subset of SGML that was being pushed for a year or two primarily for Braille production.

Which leads me to a plug for our home based business.

Braille Services

Edie and I produce Braille Textbooks for the State of Texas and files, tagged and flat ASCII, for publishers. Several years back, Texas enacted a Braille Bill. One of the provisions of this bill was that publishers submitting bids for textbooks to the state must supply an electronic disk of the book so that Instant Braille could then be produced by importing these electronic files into Braille translation software and have the formatted Braille textbooks fall out. Hee, hee.

What is really involved?

Most of the publishers were not yet using desktop publishing software packages, Quark, Pagemaker, Framemaker, etc., and, as a matter of fact, did not even have electronic files. Can you believe it? Furthermore, to produce the needed files--Texas was being advised that ICADD tagged files would ultimately be required--the publishers would incur a cost comparable to producing the Braille master files. No one seemed to realize that the publishers cost for producing files would be passed on to the state, and then the state would have to pay the Braille producer to make this instant Braille

What else?

Well, it turns out, even for those Braille producers sophisticated enough to handle the publishers files, (some MAC, some DOS; some ASCII, some tagged, some with strange symbols left from exporting algorithms) instant Braille did not fall out of the translation software. MegaDots and Duxbury, the two biggies of Braille translation, had no trouble translating the words; but, they needed a lot of guidance formatting the stylistic structures. Textbook format is a rather fussy business. The blind reader must be able to tell if text is a caption, body text, play stage directions, if it is italicized--well, you get the picture. Unless the publishers file can pass on all this information to the Braille translation software, the Braille producer must do this,

You still haven't told me what you do!

Edie and I make Braille--all kinds from all sources. We scan, we import from publisher disks, we work from MAC or DOS/WIN, we produce files for publishers, and we beta test translation software.

Well ...

To see what we look like working our hardest click here.

To see a usless HTML trick, click here

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