The Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium published odt2braille, a Braille extension to OpenOffice, a open source suite of office productivity tools, earlier this month.
Odt2braille will enable authors to print documents to a Braille embosser, a printer publishing text as Braille, and to export documents as Braille files. The Braille output is well-formatted and highly customizable, according to the press release of the University.
The OpenOffice plug-in is developed with the support of the Aegis project (Open Accessibility Everywhere: Groundwork, Infrastructure, Standards), a research project funded by the European Union.
Odt2braille is published using the LGPLv3 (GNU Lesser General Public License) open source licence. "We decided to use this licence to make it compatible with some of the software libraries we use, and to make sure our application can be integrated in commercial applications, since we want to make this available to as much users a possible."
Currently, only a Windows version is available. According to one of the developers involved in the project, Christophe Strobbe, the versions for the Mac OS X and Linux operating systems are waiting on updates of Liblouis and Liblouisxml, two software libraries that help translating to and from Braille files.
"Odt2braille uses a recent version of Liblouisxml. The version that is supplied by the Debian and Ubuntu Linux distributions dates from November 2009. We contributed some changes to liblouisxml, and are now waiting for these updates to be published."