Braille + Hebrew?

[cellio]

Dear LJ Brain Trust,

A member of our minyan has a degenerative vision problem and can no longer use even a very-large-print prayer book. (She was absent for a while and returned this week with a guide dog.) She realized that she didn't know as many of the prayers by heart as she thought she did, so I'm spending some time with her to teach her by ear and we'll scare up some recordings for her, but memorization isn't really the ideal solution. Sure, people can and do memorize the core, common prayers, but it's hard to memorize everything, and sometimes there are seasonal changes, so you really want to be able to read the prayer book.

I once saw somebody who used a Braille prayer book, but at the time I didn't ask him how that worked and he's since passed away. Braille is, as I understand it, a letter-by-letter notation system with an extra layer (called "condensed", I've heard) where common words have their own symbols instead of being spelled out. (Like American Sign Language, except I have the impression that the balance between spelled-out and condensed is different. I may be wrong about that.) But -- all of that kind of assumes a particular alphabet, right? So how would Hebrew be rendered in Braille -- do they transliterate it and then Braille-encode that, or does the reader have to learn a different Braille language to match the different alphabet, or what?

I'd like to be able to help her get a prayer book she can read. I don't think she's ready to learn a second Braille language (she's still working on the first).

And a related question: she has an iPad; are there Braille peripherals for that like (I understand) there are for desktop computers? Is "digital copy of the book + iPad + peripheral" a practical alternative to the massive paper tome? (She would use technology on Shabbat for that purpose.)

Comments

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

do they transliterate it and then Braille-encode that, or does the reader have to learn a different Braille language to match the different alphabet, or what?

If it's like Japanese, then for general purposes they encode the native alphabet for the language rather than encoding transliterations.
Though, I'm guessing that regular print prayerbooks with transliterations along with (/instead of) hebrew letters must exist? You could try to find a braille version of one of those, perhaps.

[cellio]

Some prayer books (like the one my congregation uses) include full transliteration along with translation (and of course the Hebrew). Today I learned that Hebrew Braille uses the same letters (mostly) as English Braille, just mapping them differently -- but similarly where possible, e.g. the Hebrew letter that makes a "d" sound uses the "d" encoding. So Braille-encoding the transliteration might not be all that different from encoding the actual Hebrew, as it turns out.

I also learned that all Braille is read left to right; you don't have the immediate clue (from the character set) that this language is read differently, so you have to start reading the Braille to know what you're dealing with anyway. So, since you're going to start from the left...