Here’s a news-site feature I hadn’t seen before: Braille versions of
individual news stories.
On casperstartribune.net,
each story has a “Braille file” link next to text
that says: “This will download to your computer a computer braille ASCII file
of the current story translated into grade 2 braille. This file may be sent
to any standard braille embosser.”
Here’s an example story. (Look for “Braille file” at the bottom of the page.)
This is an excellent feature, and, from a site maintainer’s perspective, it’s
the sort of incremental site improvement that (I assume) has a low, one-time
cost — the initial feature set-up — and just runs itself from then on, with
no need for human maintenance.
A similar example is the “iPod-friendly” story functionality we made when I
worked at LJWorld.com (example).
An incremental improvement, it took less than an hour to set up, and the
feature just runs itself, plugging into the publishing system’s story
database.
