The image is of a blind man sitting at a computer, attempting to read the screen of his computer with his fingers as if there is braille on it.

Building your Spreadsheet or .CSV file

When building your spreadsheet, you need to have at least 5 columns that Niv Louie requires to do all the things Niv Louie can do. These columns should be named:

  1. 1. Character
  2. 2. Name
  3. 3. Unicode
  4. 4. Type
  5. 5. Braille

A brief explanation will be presented below:

  1. Character: This column should contain the Character you want to be read or in braille.
  2. Name: This column should contain the name of the character. This column will be used for NVDA as well as for the Lib Louis table. The name you give the character is what NVDA will call it as NVDA is reading the characters. Further, what you put in this column is what Niv Louie will put in the notes for the Lib Louis tables.
  3. Unicode: In this column, there should be the sequence of numbers and letters which Unicode is made of. You can get these from an online search for Unicode. You can also get them in Microsoft Word by placing your cursor to the right of the character and pressing the Alt key and the Letter X. This will convert the character to a sequence of numbers and letters that the character is made from.
  4. Type: This column should be the “optcode” for Lib Louis. This optcode tells Lib Louis if the character is a letter, punctuation, contraction, etc. You should get the list of “OPTCODE” from Lib Louis to make sure you’re placing the correct “OptCode” in this column.
  5. Braille: This column should be the Unicode braille character that you want to represent the Character you want accessible by braille. A Unicode braille character is a series of dots that represent a braille cell. Unicode makes every possible configuration for 6 and 8 dot braille. You can find a list of these Unicode braille characters on Wikipedia. Niv Louie supports both 6 and 8 dot configurations.

>Note on Contractions

If you are building out complex contractions or characters with elaborate rules that are attempting to be captured and presented correctly in braille, then this is an important section for you.

It is easy to build contractions and other rules into this spreadsheet. For example, if you are building a contraction for the word “Day,” do the following:

  1. In the character column, write the characters you want contracted. In our example, you would write the word day.
  2. In the Unicode column, you would write “0064+0061+0079” because 0064 is the Unicode for d, 0061 is the Unicode for a, and 0079 is the Unicode for y.
  3. In the Type column, you would write the optcode from Lib Louis that you want to use.
  4. In the Braille column, you would use dot 5 in the Unicode braille and dots 145 in the Unicode braille.

When using this spreadsheet to build a braille document, Niv Louie will make the word day a dot 5 and dot 145. These rules will also be incorporated into the table that you are building for Lib Louis as well. This rule will also be incorporated into the YAML file, which is used to build a test file for Lib Louis.

Once your spreadsheet is created, you must save it as a .csv file. Niv Louie only supports uploading .CSV files to build projects from.