Smart Phone Integration with DBT

There are many ways to use a Smart Phone to Work with DBT. These notes just mention a few.

Disclaimer: Readers should beware that "cloud computing" applications change often and without warning, so these instructions may no longer work exactly as presented after any such a change. Kindly use this page more as a source of inspiration than as an exact guide to functionality from a particular vendor. (Note: All logos shown below and products described are trademarked by their respective owners.)

From An Android Phone to Duxbury DBT

These instructions allow you to scan a small section of text with your Smart Phone camera, have it converted to text, and subsequently load the text into DBT for braille production. These instructions use the Adobe ExportPDF software, which costs $20 annually for a license to produce a limited number of pages in a year.

• Use Google Play to load the Google Drive app. This is a free app.
• Download Google Drive for your Windows computer at https://tools.google.com/dlpage/drive
• Use the same e-mail address and password for both installations, so the two accounts are linked.
• On the Smart Phone, open the Google Drive app. Press the plus sign. Choose Scan. We suggest you work with a very simple document to gain experience with this application.
• Do not try to scan in landscape mode, always use portrait (i.e. do not hold the phone sideways).
• Click on the Check Mark when you like your image. This step creates a PDF in Google Drive.
• On your desktop or laptop computer, open Google Drive and it should sync with the Android.
• On your desktop or laptop, once you view your PDF, go to File, then Save As, and then Word or Excel Online ...
• The first time you do this, you are asked to pay Adobe $20 (plus tax) for their ExportPDF software.
• The software asks you where on your computer you want to save a Microsoft Word file. Use a directory for temporary files.
• Launch Duxbury DBT. Open the Microsoft Word file created in the previous step

From iPhone to Duxbury DBT

There are quite a few suitable OCR applications on the iPhone. We have had a lot of good experience with ABBYY Finereader on a Windows computer. The same company offers ABBYY FineReader Touch for text recognition via an on-line OCR service on the iPhone.

Click here for a review. The cost is about 5 cents per page scanned, in lumps of $5-$10, and it produces files in an editable format (i.e. Microsoft Word files).

iPhone Accessibility

The iPhone is the most accessible Smart Phone made for the general market.

It directly connects with 40 different braille displays.

From Duxbury DBT to Smart Phone

Duxbury DBT can translate from braille-to-print, from a DBT .dxb file to a DBT .dxp file. You can then export a DBT .dxp file to an Adobe PDF file (using, for example, Microsoft Word). The PDF file can be sent to your Android, iPhone, Kindle, or other mobile device. Click here for the details.

Once you have created the PDF, it is just a matter of using e-mail or a "cloud computing" application to share files from your non-mobile device to your mobile device. This can be Drop Box, Google Drive, or any other of the systems that exist to meet this need.