A versatile tool has been created, with user-friendly interface, for the rapid and efficient conversion of printed books to braille books for the use of persons with visual disability – using compatible plug-in ocrs for any language. the tool has been developed in java using eclipse swt and runs on linux, windows and mac operating systems. this gui and editing tool has been developed as an open source project and is available under the apache 2.0 license from code.google.com. an individual scanned page or all the pages of a whole book can be recognized by this tool. the output can be saved in rtf, xml or brf (braille) format directly, by the click of a button. there is a provision for manually selecting the individual columns of a two-column printed page or even marking the individual rectangular text blocks of a page with a more complex manhattan layout. the user can modify the reading order of the so-selected text blocks. this information of ordered text blocks is passed on to any ocr integrated at the backend of the tool and hence the recognized text in unicode is put together in the same reading order. in the case of books with identical or very similar text layouts across its pages, such an user-defined layout can be saved as a custom layout and automatically applied to segment the other pages of the same book or a different book also. our own ocr plug-ins: currently, we have developed tamil and kannada ocrs. the average time taken for digitizing a page is two seconds. more than 500 tamil books (school, college, story and general) have been converted by our ocr and delivered as braille books to hundreds of blind students in tamil nadu. our ocr has been installed free of charge in several computers of rcmct worth trust rehabilitation centre, chennai and they have been running it as a service for blind students for the past 4 years. worth trust uses our ocr to recognize and convert printed text to unicode first and then to braille code and prints them on a braille printer and gives the braille book to the requesting blind person. they have also digitized tamil books for the same cause on behalf of https://www.bookshare.org/. we have also given it to many other similar organizations in tamil nadu. similarly, we have given the kannada version to some voluntary agencies and individual blind students in karnataka.