Instructions

The steps

1. Press "Choose a file" and pick a photo, image or PDF. On a phone you can take the photo there and then.
2. If the file has several pages (PDF or TIFF), enter the page you want, or choose "All pages" for a single Braille file, up to 40 pages at a time (about 15 seconds a page). Each page of the book starts on a new Braille page.
3. Press "Convert to Braille". Recognition usually takes 10–30 seconds; progress is announced every few seconds.
4. Under "Result", download the file you need or copy the Braille.
5. Check the result. See accuracy below.

How to take a good photo

The quality of the photo matters more than anything else. Even a slight tilt or blur can spoil recognition a great deal.

• One page at a time, the whole page in the frame, as large as possible.
• From directly above: hold the phone parallel to the page, not at an angle.
• A flat page: press the book gently so the page does not curve near the spine.
• Good, even light, without the shadow of your hand or phone. Avoid the flash: it causes glare.
• A steady hand: rest your elbows on the table and wait for the camera to focus.
• If you have a PDF or a scanner, use them: they give the best results (300 dpi).

Which files it accepts

• Photos and images: JPG, PNG, HEIC/HEIF (iPhone), WebP, AVIF, TIFF (including multi-page), GIF, BMP.
• PDF: you choose the page.
• .byzx or .byz: a score written in the Neanes program. No recognition is needed, so the Braille has no reading errors and includes the lyrics.
• .byzocr: recognition files from the Neanes OCR, for those who have already corrected one.
• Maximum size: 40 MB. Very large photos are scaled down automatically.

The results and what to do with them

In the "Recognition check", each Braille segment is listed with a description of its signs, for example "petaste + oligon, klasma". When you select a segment, the signs it came from are highlighted on the page; signs with low confidence have a dashed orange box. Warnings mark places the Dositheos method does not cover explicitly: there the converter does not guess, and a human check is needed.

Correcting errors and adding lyrics

Automatic recognition makes mistakes. Anyone who can see the score, a teacher or a chanter for example, can correct them in the page, without knowing Braille.

1. Under "Check and correct", press "Correct" next to a segment, or click a sign on the page.
2. For each sign, change what is needed: neume, time sign, gorgon, sharp or flat, psephiston or antikenoma, vareia, phthora. For martyriae you change the note, register and genus.
3. "Delete this sign" if the sign is not in the score, "Add a neume after this one" if one is missing.
4. Lyrics: in the "Syllable" field of the neume on which each syllable starts, type the syllable, e.g. "Κυ". The Braille then writes the syllable with its music, as the method prescribes.
5. Press "Apply corrections". The Braille is rewritten at once by the Dositheos rules, and corrected signs get a green box.

There is Undo and Back to the original reading. Results are deleted after 6 hours, so press "Save corrections" to keep your work in a file (.byzdots.json). Upload it again to carry on where you left off. The page image is not stored in that file.

The editor works with the keyboard alone and with screen readers, so a blind user who knows what the score says can use it too.

Accuracy and limitations

Conversion happens in two stages, and errors can come from either:

1. Recognition (OCR): the signs are found in the image by our own recognition engine, which runs inside the application with no other service. It recognises about 99% of the pieces of ink correctly on pages it did not see in training.
2. Conversion to Braille: done with the rules of the Dositheos method from the thesis. On the thesis's four worked examples, a cell-by-cell comparison with the thesis's solution, from the photo to the Braille, gives a similarity of 89–97% (Kekragarion in the grave mode 97%, Kekragario in the first mode 95%, Pasapnoario in the plagal second 94%, Agni Parthene 89% from a very small image). Most differences are martyriae and rare signs.

What this means in practice: on a clean page with 100 signs, expect up to about 10 errors, and more on blurred or tilted photos. That is why the Braille must be checked by someone who knows the method before it is used for teaching or at the chanter's stand.

Known limitations:

• Lyrics: reading them from photos is experimental (the “Read the lyrics from the image” option): our own letter recognition reads them, with accents and breathings; about 8 syllables in 10 come out right, so they must be checked. The large decorated initial letter is not read yet. Without lyrics, the Braille has one line per line of the score. You can type them in the correction editor.
• Fonts: the engine was trained mostly on modern printed editions and on signs we printed with free Byzantine fonts. Old books in a very different typeface are recognised less well.
• Handwritten scores are not supported.
• Less common signs (some phthorai, chroai and martyriae) are recognised less reliably, because there were few training examples.
• Text close to the neumes (titles, comments) may be mistaken for signs.

How to find errors: the martyriae are checkpoints. If a martyria is not the one you expect, the error lies somewhere between it and the last correct martyria.

Frequently asked questions

Acknowledgements

Recognition uses our own engine. The free fonts of the Neanes team (SIL OFL 1.1) were used to measure how signs combine and for synthetic examples; at the start, the open-source Neanes byzantine-chant-ocr gave the first proposals for the training labels, each of which was checked. We thank papline editions for permission to use their pages in training. A key work in the field is C. Dalitz, G. K. Michalakis and C. Pranzas, "Optical Recognition of Psaltic Byzantine Chant Notation" (IJDAR, 2008). The Braille rules come from the doctoral thesis of Fr. Theodoros Tsampatzidis. All third-party work is listed under software licences.

Questions or problems: info@byzantine-dots.gr