Of course, I think braille is neat looking as well as really useful, and it reminds me about an idea I had for an exhibit web page (it's about communication). :)

By the way, did you know your preview button isn't working correctly?

And maybe you're right, and everyone knows it's braille so they don't need to ask. The woman who asked said that she was curious about what it was, and I don't think she recognized it as simulated braille.

I found a free online translator to transcribe from black to braille, but I am still looking for something to do the reverse (braille to black).

For transcribing, my braille agency uses software called Braille2000. It's pretty good, and it can also translate from print to braille. However, it makes lots of mistakes, and there are ways in which computers simply are not capable of creating correct braille.

For example, in Braille there's a sign for a period/full stop (dots 256), and there's a different sign for an ellipsis (dot 3 repeated in 3 cells). So what happens when there are four dots in print? That depends on the syntax of the preceding sentence. If the sentence was complete and there's nothing obviously missing, the period goes first (ex: "I used to have a cat...."). Otherwise the ellipsis goes first, inside the sentence (ex: "I used to..."). How do you expect a computer to understand that?

There are lots of examples like that. Word division is probably the most common one, although it might be solveable. The problem is, language is designed for parsing by humans, not computers. We don't know how we understand language, so it's very difficult to build a computer program that can do even a halfway decent job of it.

Libbraille looks really cool, especially from an open-source perspective. Thanks for mentioning it. I did notice that their translator doesn't even offer American Grade 2 as an option, probably because it seems to be an EU-based project. I shall have to see whether I can lend a hand.