KAIST researchers develop next-generation Korean-Braille transcription program

A team of researchers at KAIST has developed a next-generation Braille transcription program that enables complex transcription with heightened accuracy, said KAIST on Friday.

Braille transcription is a process that converts literary characters to their Braille equivalent for people with low vision or who are blind. The team — led by KAIST Prof. Ka Hyun-wook, a blind man — developed the program in response to the existing technologies' limited understanding of spacing, compound words and special characters.

The new program, "K-Braille," can comprehend both sentences as a whole and different sentence structures through context clues It serves as a more accurate alternative to the conventional method, which only offers simple, literal transcriptions.

The team extracted 17,943 sentences from the biggest Braille-Korean word translation dataset in Korea, compiled by the National Institute of Korean Language, to test the program's accuracy.   

Regarding the transcriptions' True Adjusted Accuracy score, referring to the overall accuracy, K-Braille earned 100 percent. For the Braille morphological structure similarity score, which compares the structures of a program's Braille sentences to preset answers, K-Braille received 99.81 percent. 

Both of these figures were higher than those of the current official Braille transcription program, which was designed by the institute.  

“Braille is more than just characters. It’s a language we speak to read the world," said Prof. Ka. “I plan to upgrade the program to conquer complex languages, including math formulas, science symbols and even sheet music.”

The team plans to release K-braile to the public free of charge as part of their Inclusive AI initiative, with priority given to public sectors, Braille libraries, education offices and manufacturers of assistive devices.

“I hope this new technology elevates information accessibility for the blind and creates a new road map for Korea’s AI-driven Braille transcription program,” said Prof. Ka.

BY LEE JI-WON [lee.jiwon10@joongang.co.kr]