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The Story of RoboBraille

The RoboBraille service was invented by Lars Ballieu Christensen and Svend Thougaard, and has won several international awards since 2007. As a result of benevolence and cooperation with financial and professional partners, the service has gained a foothold in a number of countries across the globe; primarily institutions dealing with those who are visually impaired, dyslexic or illiterate. Before implementation, RoboBraille was simply an idea.

Shaping an Idea

Since the late 1980s, Svend and Lars have been working on developing ICT-based solutions, aimed towards allowing electronic documents to be accessible to those with visual or reading impairments. The two investors pursued a goal of generating an easier, faster and cheaper way of producing materials for educational purposes. In spring 2004, Lars and Svend sat down to discuss possible solutions on how to simplify the electronic production of Braille, without jeopardising the quality of the produced material.

Moreover, they wanted to develop a solution capable of attracting people from outside the very small group of Danish Braille users, and thus build the foundation of a viable service - RoboBraille as we know it today.
The solution was essentially inspired by the many digital self-service solutions used in areas such as airports and cinemas. "It must be possible to develop an email service which is able to receive documents via e-mail and then return them to the user, after the service having automatically converted the documents into an alternative format.

If we, besides Braille can create alternatives to the written materials in synthetic speech, then the solution will be attractive to both dyslexic and illiterate users, as well as people who are visually impaired. By making the solution e-mail based, we will be able to offer the service to people all over the world”, explains Lars Ballieu Christensen.

The Release of First Version of RoboBraille

It did not take long to implement the initial idea into the first version of RoboBraille, as after just three months of developing and testing, launch was to occur in August 2004.

In the early stages, the version was named Sensus Auto Mail Responder (AMR), and was capable of converting Danish documents from text to Braille, as well as converting English and Danish documents into synthetic speech, such as audio files in MP3 format.
Shortly after release the service was renamed RoboBraille, and quickly became popular in the community of professionals working with visually impaired people.

Leading up to Christmas 2004, the local county management became aware of RoboBraille. The county encouraged the inventors and Synscenter Refsnæs (The Danish Centre for Visual Impairment – Children and Youth) to apply for E. funding, so that the service would expand into other countries. The council assisted the RoboBraille team with the application work via the use of their vocational advisors and office in Brussels.

RoboBraille Enters EU

In May 2005, Synscenter Refsnæs applied to the EU Commission for funding of project, wherein the RoboBraille service could be localised and tested in Ireland, Great Britain, Italy, Portugal and Cyprus. The project was implemented in 2006-2007 and was a notable success. Three general results of the project:

  • That a range of new speech accounts were added to the RoboBraille service (British English, Italian, Portuguese and Greek).
  • That RoboBraille became capable of producing Braille in English, Italian, Portuguese and Greek.
  • That the RoboBraille user interface became customisable in the aforementioned languages.

During the process, RoboBraille also received donations from France and Lithuania, which consequently extended the language scope of the service to include speech in both French and Lithuanian.

RoboBraille was elected “project of the month” by the EU Commission, and in December 2007, RoboBraille was named by The British Computer Society as the winner of the highly acclaimed Social Contribution Award 2007.

Multi-year Subsidy Ensured the Running and Development of RoboBraille


For the purpose of taking the development of RoboBraille even further, Synscenter Refsnæs continued its fundraising activity, and succeeded in obtaining funds from two Danish ministries. The Ministry of the Interior and Social Affairs granted the RoboBraille service a multi-year subsidy as an amendment to the Danish State Budget from 2008 to 2011. Furthermore, The Ministry of Education funded the service in 2008-2009 in a project aimed towards developing the service potential of helping those with dyslexia and reading difficulties.

The financial resources aid daily operation, including technical support and future development of RoboBraille. An aim has been to include other languages (German, Spanish, French and Russian), different document formats (pdf, scanned documents) and publishing formats (DAISY - structured audio books, formatted Braille). In addition, funds are used for developing basic, new functions such as formatting and word division of Braille. On this basis, it is possible to consolidate the production of Braille in Denmark and base it on RoboBraille technology. This achievement is the result of collaboration between RoboBraille and Nota (The Danish Library for the Blind).

The Work Continues

The extended functionality of RoboBraille is highly acknowledged, and was very recently named winner of the “special educational needs solution” prize at the 2010 BETT Awards. In addition to pride and motivation for ongoing work, the prizes have brought a range of tangible advantages. For example: RoboBraille service won the EU Commission main prize for digital accessibility; a contributing factor to the donation of licenses from Microsoft for RoboBraille in 2008.

The further development of RoboBraille is an ongoing process, and will be performed in cooperation between RoboBrailles consultants, users and partners around the world.
For more information about our current projects, please refer to the main menu.