Open a Braille2000 file and get a report: emphasis passages that were never terminated, a Special Symbols page out of braille order, an unbalanced Nemeth switch, a table cell crossing a column boundary. The things that are genuinely hard to catch by eye and expensive to find after the braille is embossed.
Drag a .B2K or .BML onto the page, or pick it from a file dialog. If the book has tactile graphics, add the artwork alongside it — a CorelDRAW .cdr, or better, a PDF export of it. Nothing to install and nothing to configure.
A .B2K carries both the rendered cells and the structure behind them, so the checker can reason about tables, boxes and pagination rather than guessing from the cells alone.
Errors and warnings, each with the page and line it was found on, so you can go straight to it in Braille2000. A hundred-page volume comes back in well under a second.
Every rule below came out of real transcription work — these are the mistakes that actually recur, not a checklist copied out of a manual.
Whether the symbols you used are listed, and whether the list runs in braille order as Formats requires. Braille order is easy to get wrong from memory — the ordering used here was taken cell by cell from Appendix 3 of the 2024 Rules of UEB.
Passage indicators opened and never terminated, stray terminators with nothing to close, and emphasis that needs restating after returning from a Nemeth switch.
Opening and closing indicators that do not balance, and switches left hanging where they should have been closed.
Body pages missing a print page number, and print numbering that runs backwards. Volumes that legitimately carry no print pagination at all — worksheets, slide decks, datasets — are left alone.
Content crowding the braille page number, box lines that do not run clean, and other grid problems that only show up once the page is full.
Cells crossing a column boundary. The column geometry is derived from the heading separation line, so the check knows where the columns actually are rather than inferring them from whitespace.
Characters that are not braille at all — the kind that survive a conversion and emboss as nonsense — and transcription directives that leaked into the text.
The pages you reserved for graphics are checked against the artwork itself. A .cdr confirms the count matches; a PDF export of it carries live braille, so every graphic page is checked individually. Tag graphics and supply neither and it tells you, rather than passing in silence.
A checker that reports false errors is worse than no checker, because you stop reading it. Every rule here was run against 297 real transcribed volumes and tightened until the known-good ones came back with no false errors.
The table rule is the clearest example. A simple alignment check flagged 440 blocks. Excluding transcriber notes sitting inside the table, headers and page numbers picked up where a table spans a page break, and spanning total rows that legitimately cross every boundary brought that down to two — both in the same already-known-broken file. Each of these exclusions matters.
Which symbols belong on a Special Symbols page was settled the same way, measured across the 175 files that have one rather than decided in the abstract. Of the full 297-volume corpus, 189 report nothing at all.
Real findings from real volumes, each one a thing that would otherwise have reached paper:
Tactile graphics are a common source of hidden errors: the braille reserves four pages, the artwork runs to five, and nobody notices until it is embossed. Add the artwork beside the braille and the checker finds the difference.
.cdrA CorelDRAW file gives up its page count, so the checker can confirm that the number of graphic pages reserved in the braille matches the number of pages actually drawn.
Better. A braille PDF exported from CorelDRAW carries live braille text, so each graphic page is read and checked in turn — the braille on the page and its numbering, not just how many pages there are.
Reserve graphic pages but hand over no artwork and you get told. Never tag the graphics in Braille2000 at all and the checker says that too, instead of passing the whole family of graphic checks in silence.
A print source sitting in the job folder under the same name as the braille will not be mistaken for the graphics — only a real CorelDRAW braille export is read as one.
Counting pages in a .cdr needs a file saved by CorelDRAW X4 or later. Older files use a different internal format and are reported as unreadable rather than guessed at, which is the safer failure — a wrong page count is worse than none. Export a PDF of the artwork instead and the version stops mattering.
Uploads go to a temporary directory, get checked, and are deleted before the response reaches you. Nothing is retained, and nothing is logged except how many findings came back. If you transcribe under contract, your client material never becomes ours.
Braille2000 .B2K and .BML files. A .B2K carries both the rendered braille text and the underlying markup, which is what lets the checker reason about structure — tables, boxes, page numbering — rather than only reading cells. You can add the tactile graphics alongside it too: a CorelDRAW .cdr, or a PDF export of one.
.cdr?Because of what each one can give up. A .cdr keeps its page contents in CorelDRAW’s own binary format, which it would take CorelDRAW itself to read — so the page count is genuinely all the checker can take from it. A PDF exported from the same artwork carries live braille text, so every graphic page can be checked on its own: the braille on it and its page numbering. If you have both, add the PDF.
.cdr cannot be read?Files saved by CorelDRAW X4 or later are read directly. An older file uses a different internal format, and rather than guess at a page count the checker reports that it could not read it. Export a PDF of the artwork instead — that works whatever version drew it, and it is the better input anyway.
No. It catches mechanical and formatting errors — an emphasis passage that was never terminated, a Special Symbols page out of braille order, a table cell crossing a column boundary. It cannot tell you whether a heading is really a heading or whether a graphic was described well. A proofreader still reads the book; the checker makes sure they are not spending that time on things a machine can find.
No. Uploads are written to a temporary directory, checked, and deleted before the response is sent back to you. Nothing is retained and nothing is logged except the number of findings.
They were measured against 297 real transcribed volumes rather than read off a rulebook in the abstract. Which symbols must appear on a Special Symbols page, for example, was derived from how often each one actually appears across the 175 files that have such a page. Rules that produced noise on known-good files were tightened or dropped.
Less than you would expect, because the rules were tuned against real files until known-good volumes came back clean — 189 of the 297 test volumes report nothing at all. Where a rule is less certain it reports a warning rather than an error. If you do hit a false positive, tell us which rule and we will look at it against the corpus.
It is free while in early access. It will become a paid feature later, and we would rather say so now than surprise you. You need a free QBT account to use it, which also gives you 25 free pages in the braille converter.
A hundred-page volume is checked in well under a second. You are not waiting on it.
Take something you have already checked by hand and see whether it agrees with you. That is the honest test, and it is the one we would want to run.
Open the Braille CheckerBraille transcription editor: six-key entry on formatted braille pages, UEB and Nemeth translation, proofreading views and the Braille Checker built in. Windows, Mac and iPad.
Upload a textbook PDF, review the extracted structure and export embosser-ready BRF for a transcriber to review. Starts with 25 free pages.
A quality-control report for Braille2000 .B2K and .BML files. It is also built into Quality Brailler.
Free Microsoft Word add-in that finds what would be lost or wrong in braille, fixes it with you and sends the document to Quality Brailler.
Type text or a name and see it in UEB braille, free, in your browser.