The Duxbury Braille Translator from Duxbury Systems Inc. does translation and formatting of braille and includes word processing software. There are two kinds of basic speech recognition. The easiest to develop is discrete speech, which does a good job of recognizing single words. This has been around for many years. The second kind, continuous speech software capable of understanding normal speech, was introduced by Dragon Systems in 1997 and is still in need of improvement.
Most programs have the ability to learn a user's speech patterns and pronunciation.
They begin as speaker independent systems but rapidly become much more accurate for a specific user. Such a program is often priced according to the size of its vocabulary. The best option often is to get a program with a small working vocabulary to which you can add job-specific terminology. This both speeds recognition processing and increases accuracy. Other companies, such as SpeechWorks International Inc. of Boston and Philips Electronics of Atlanta, offer powerful server-based continuous speech recognition systems, but they are not systems you could buy and install in time to meet the 508 deadlines.