Access to all components of scanned mathematical documents by vision-impaired students

ABSTRACT

Vision-impaired people access documents using screen readers. Electronic documents may contain non-textual components, non-linear components, and multidimensional components, such as mathematical expressions and graphs. These components create a number of accessibility issues for those who use screen readers as assistive technology. The research presented here describes mathematical information retrieval, and accessible and navigable representation of mathematical function graphs as solutions to these issues. Additionally, this research study is about how to present course materials to vision-impaired students, and is not about how to teach them. The system shows promise, given an initial evaluation by a vision-impaired person, and an encouraging review by three blind professionals. The next step is to perform a full evaluation of the system employing a larger number of vision-impaired students.

KEYWORDS:

• communication
• computer access
• knowledge translation
• vision-impaired