webeditor

A website for working with braille documents: type braille, or upload a braille file, and view it alongside the same document as LaTeX or Markdown — editing either side updates the other. Download the result as LaTeX, Markdown, or Word, or open an HTML preview. It supports math in Nemeth format. Try it at https://brailletools.org/

What it does

• Two live-synced panes. The braille pane is the source of truth; the second pane shows LaTeX or Markdown (switch with the format selector). Edits in either pane update the other at paragraph/equation granularity, and anything that can't be synced is listed under "sync issues" with a link to jump to it.
• Upload .brf / .brl (braille), .md, .tex and .docx (converted through Pandoc, in your browser), or photos of embossed braille pages (read with OCR, entirely client-side).
• Download LaTeX, Markdown, or Word, or Open HTML for a preview.
• Braille table — the liblouis table used to translate between braille and text.
• Treat each braille line as a paragraph — a blank line starts a new paragraph and a single line break is just a wrapped line (right for hard-wrapped BRFs). Turn it on for files where every line is its own paragraph, so you don't need blank lines between them in the braille.

Everything runs in the browser; nothing you upload is sent to a server.

Accessible PDFs

The downloaded .tex is set up to compile to a tagged PDF (PDF/UA-2) — the structure, language, document title and MathML-tagged math that screen readers need. The title comes from the file name. Compile it with pdflatex or lualatex from TeX Live / MiKTeX 2025 or later (older versions don't understand the tagging commands). This produces the tags but doesn't validate them; check the PDF with veraPDF or PAC before claiming conformance. Details and one lualatex limitation are in braille-bridge's README.

Developing

Uses Node 20 and pnpm 10. The conversion and OCR code live in sibling repositories that this project installs from sibling directories, so check them out next to this one:

braille/
├── webeditor/      ← this repo
├── braille-bridge/ ← https://github.com/brailletools/braille-bridge
└── brailleocr/     ← https://github.com/brailletools/brailleocr

pnpm install
pnpm dev                # fetches liblouis + the OCR models, then starts Vite
pnpm dev -- --open      # ...and opens the app in a browser tab

If you change a sibling repo, re-run pnpm install and clear node_modules/.vite — pnpm copies file: dependencies, so the app won't see the change otherwise.

Pinned versions

CI (and the deploy) don't use your local siblings; they clone the exact tags named in:

File	Repository	Purpose
braille-bridge.version	braille-bridge	braille ⟷ LaTeX/Markdown conversion
brailleocr.version	brailleocr	photo OCR
dataset.version	dataset	OCR model weights

To pick up a new release, change the file in a pull request — see RELEASING.md.

Checks

pnpm lint                                # Prettier + ESLint
pnpm check                               # Svelte type check
pnpm test:unit                           # Vitest
pnpm exec playwright install chromium    # once
pnpm test:a11y                           # axe-core accessibility checks (see CLAUDE.md)
pnpm test:sync                           # bidirectional sync, in a real browser
pnpm test:format                         # second-pane formats and uploads

Run pnpm test:a11y after any UI change — this tool's audience includes screen-reader users, so treat a failure as a real bug.

Building

pnpm build      # static site in build/
pnpm preview

Contributing and releases

Changes go through pull requests that must pass CI; main deploys to GitHub Pages when a PR is merged, and releases are version tags on main. See RELEASING.md.

Dependencies & Credits

This project uses the following open-source libraries:

braille-bridge

The braille ⟷ LaTeX/Markdown conversion and the live-sync document model.

• License: BSD-3-Clause

brailleocr and onnxruntime-web

Reads photos of embossed braille pages, running ONNX models in the browser.

• License: BSD-3-Clause (brailleocr), MIT (onnxruntime-web)

Abraham (Desmos)

Handles Nemeth to LaTeX conversion for mathematical notation.

• License: Proprietary (Desmos API)
• Usage: Converts ASCII Braille math (Nemeth) to LaTeX format

liblouis

Provides Braille translation tables and conversion logic for various languages and Braille grades.

• License: LGPL v2.1+
• Usage: Translates between Braille and text, supports Grade 1, Grade 2, and UEB; the JavaScript binding (compiled to WebAssembly) runs it in the browser

pandoc-wasm

Pandoc compiled to WebAssembly.

• License: GPL-2.0-or-later
• Usage: Converts uploaded .tex / .docx files to Markdown, and Markdown to Word

latex.js

A JavaScript LaTeX parser that generates HTML from LaTeX source code, enabling client-side rendering.

• License: MIT
• Usage: Converts LaTeX to HTML for the "Open HTML" preview