Study of Tools & Techniques for Accessing Mathematics by Partially Sighted / Visually Impaired persons. Akashdeep Bansal

Size: px

Start display at page:

Download "Study of Tools & Techniques for Accessing Mathematics by Partially Sighted / Visually Impaired persons. Akashdeep Bansal"

Darren Wells
6 years ago
Views:

1 Study of Tools & Techniques for Accessing Mathematics by Partially Sighted / Visually Impaired persons Akashdeep Bansal

2 Contents 1 Introduction 1 2 Non Computerised Techniques Nemeth Braille Table of Nemeth Braille codes Limitations Taylor Mathematical Slate Limitations Computerised Tools and Techniques Central Access Reader Design Science Products MathType MathPlayer Limitations of Design Science Products InftyProject ChattyInfty InftyReader Limitations Conclusion 16 1

3 Chapter 1 Introduction Science and Mathematics are the important parts of day to day life for understanding the physical phenomena happening all around us. Partially Sighted / Visually Impaired people are generally kept out of the interaction with the Science and Mathematics, due to lack of accessibility of scientific content and laboratory experiments. A human body have five senses: Eye, Ear, Nose, Mouth and Skin. As Eye is not working as a good sensor for the partially sighted/visually impaired people, they have to use other senses like smell, sound and tactile to identify different objects. In 1824, Louis Braille used tactile sense and developed tactile six-dot codes for french alphabets. Later on, in 1952, Abraham Nemeth developed codes for mathematical and scientific symbols. After the development of computer technology, Screen Reader brings a movement in the life of the partially sighted/visually impaired people and gives an option to use hearing sense to work on the computer. Screen Reader is a text-to-speech converter, which speaks out the content written on the screen. There are several screen readers available, such as NVDA (Non-Visual Desktop Access), JAWS (Job Access With Screen), Windows Eye, etc. But still accessibility to scientific content is a big challenge for the partially sighted / visually impaired people. Due to the lack of availability of accessibility techniques for scientific content, some organisations are providing material in edited Word documents and audio recording formats. Edited Word Documents are plain text version of a textbook with all formatting removed, e.g., x 2 +5x+5 = 0 is written as x square plus 5 x plus 5 equals to zero. There are some software developed by various independent organisations, which can be used by partially sighted/visually impaired person to access scientific/mathematical content. Some of the tools are: MathType with NVDA and MathPlayer from Design Science, CAR (Central Access Reader) from CWU (Central Washington University) and ChattyInfty with InftyReader from Infty Project. The task of making scientific content accessible can be broken into two parts: by making e-books accessible and by making printed books accessible. MathType with MathPlayer, CAR and ChattyInfty are able to make e-books accessible with a require- 1

4 ment of content to be available in the particular format. This has led to a requirement of software, which can convert available e-books and printed books into the required format. The above two tasks are still challenging for the software developers. Every screen reader software need content in a special format, which lead to the requirement of conversion software, which can convert available e-material into the desired format. To make printed books accessible, we need an Optical Character Reader (OCR) which can extract the content from the scanned graphics and then we can convert it into desired format with the help of conversion software. There are some conversion software available, like FineReader and OCRs, but they have very good accuracy for limited languages, like English. Accuracy with the scientific content is very poor for the existing software. InftyReader from InftyProject is able to give a reasonable accuracy in extracting content from graphics but it is not affordable by an individual. We will discuss in more detail about these tools and techniques in further chapters. In Chapter 2, we describe non-computerised techniques used to read scientific content, namely Nemeth Braille code and the Taylor s Mathematical Slate. In Chapter 3, we provide details about computerised techniques and tools available and list their advantages and limitations. We conclude this report in chapter 4. 2

5 Chapter 2 Non Computerised Techniques Partially sighted/visually impaired people identify objects by touch. As they can t read the printed text on the paper, they need text to be embossed on the paper. This has given birth to a new script known as Braille. In this chapter, we will discuss about Nemeth Braille code, a script use to emboss scientific content on the paper and the Taylor s Mathematical slate, a slate for rough mathematical calculations by partially sighted / visually impaired people. 2.1 Nemeth Braille In 1952, Abraham Nemeth developed the Braille codes for mathematical notations and symbols. The Nemeth Braille Code for Mathematics is a Braille code for encoding mathematical and scientific notation linearly using standard six-dot Braille cells for tactile reading by the visually impaired Table of Nemeth Braille codes The Nemeth Braille codes for different type of symbols are General Signs: Number Signs: 3

6 Operators: Parentheses and Brackets: Fractions: Other Modifiers: 4

7 Braille Indicators: Comparison Signs: Geometry: Arrows: 5

8 Trignometric Functions: Set Theory: Miscellaneous Signs: 6

9 Polygons: Triangles: Other Signs: Greek Letters: 7

2.1.2 Limitations High Cost One printed paper translates into around 3.5 Braille pages, which leads to formation of multiple bundles of single book 2.

10 2.1.2 Limitations High Cost One printed paper translates into around 3.5 Braille pages, which leads to formation of multiple bundles of single book 2.2 Taylor Mathematical Slate In 19th century, an England Mathematician Rev. William Taylor developed a device to teach Mathematics to the blind/visually impaired (VI) students. It consists of an aluminium frame, having set of openings in the shape of eight pointed star as shown in Fig. 2.1 and different types of pegs with different orientation to represent various Mathematical symbols and operators. Figure 2.1: Aluminium frame having set of eight pointed star opening The pegs are slightly embossed, which helps in identification of the orientation by VI people. The meaning of different orientations of pegs are as described as follows - 8

11 9

12 Now, let us see an example, where we do the division operation in sighted convention and then in the Taylor slate convention. (a) Sighted convention (b) Taylor Slate convention Figure 2.2: Example describing Taylor slate convention Limitations Slate has only 25 rows and 25 columns, which limits the calculation length. Hence, one cannot do long calculations Slow and tedious job 10

13 We have described non-computerised techniques available in this chapter. In the next chapter, we go on to describe the accessibility techniques assisted by computers and such tools. 11

14 Chapter 3 Computerised Tools and Techniques After the advancement of computer technology, some organisations have developed software programs, which make the scientific content accessible with the screen reader. These software require a particular format, for e.g., MathPlayer supports equations written with MathType only. Furthermore, we need some software which can convert printed text into the particular format supported by the reader software. This is still the challenging part for the software developers to extract scientific content from graphics with a good accuracy and convert it into the proper format. In this chapter, we will discuss about available software which make scientific content accessible written in a particular supporting format. 3.1 Central Access Reader The students of Central Washington University (CWU) have developed a free, open source text-to-speech converter named as Central access reader (CAR) for print disabled people. It reads Word Documents and pasted text with customizable features like: Highlighting the current reading line with an option to change the colour. Increasing/decreasing the font size. Platform Windows (64-bit only) Download and Cost One can download the CAR windows (64-bit) for free of cost from the below URLhttp://archive.org/download/CARSetup64/CAR Setup 64.exe 12

15 Limitations No accessible editor Supports Microsoft Word documents only No feature to read text written on graphics Doesn t support the symbols inserted using insert symbol option in Word document Doesn t support equations written using non-linear features of Word like superscript or subscript etc No option to read line-by-line, letter-by-letter, word-by-word or paragraph-byparagraph, i.e., it reads complete document continuously. These options are neither available for text nor for scientific content 3.2 Design Science Products Design Science Inc. (DSI) is a California based company working since 1986 for the development of software for scientific and technical communication. Design Science has developed MathPlayer for accessing scientific content accessible with the screen reader NVDA (Non-Visual Desktop Access) by partially sighted / visually impaired people MathType MathType is an interactive accessible equation editor. It provides accessible ways of writing mathematical equations in Microsoft Word documents, web pages, presentations, and for TEX, L A TEX, and MathML documents. Process There are two ways of writing mathematical equations using MathType: with MathType editor and without editor. MathType editor is completely accessible with NVDA and provides features to write mathematical equations with the help of keyboard by using shortcut keys or L A TEX. Another way is without using MathType editor, which requires use of L A TEXwriting. The process is described below - Open Microsoft Office document. Write a mathematical equation using L A TEX, enclosed in $ like: $\nabla \times E = \frac{df}{dx}$ Select the whole equation and press alt + \ then MathType will convert it into a graphic with equation written in sighted non-linear convention, e.g., E = df dx Now if MathPlayer (see sec 3.2.2) and NVDA are installed on the system, then we can read it using NVDA screen reader. 13

16 Download and Cost A 30-day trial is available at free of cost which can be downloaded from : Its license version is also available, which costs $97 for personal user and $57 for academic users with an upgradation cost of $49 for personal user and $37 for academic users MathPlayer Design Science has developed a tool to give speech output for scientific content in Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Internet Explorer and Firefox. This tool is named as MathPlayer. It works only with the screen reader NVDA. Download and Cost Design Science MathPlayer is free of cost which can be downloaded from the below link: medium=vcheck &utm source=mpw&utm campaign=mpw Limitations of Design Science Products Design Science has made scientific content accessible to partially sighted/visually impaired at a reasonable cost but still it has some limitations. Some of which are mentioned below: Supports content written with the help of MathType only. No tool to support text on graphics, i.e., no feature to read printed books by scanning. Supports NVDA screen reader only, doesn t work with other screen readers like JAWS, Windows Eye, etc. No option to read particular section of the equation, whenever you want to read the equation, you have to read it completely. Lets say you have a doubt of + or - in the equation, then you have to read complete equation again, you don t have any other choice. 3.3 InftyProject InftyProject is a voluntary R&D organization consisting of researchers from various universities and research institutes to investigate and develop new systems to process scientific information by computer. The main research focus of these organisations are digitization technology of scientific documents, user interfaces for scientific information and accessibility of scientific information for partially sighted / visually impaired 14

17 people, in collaboration with a nonprofit organization Science Accessibility Net. InftyReader, ChattyInfty and InftyEditor are the products of InftyProject. InftyEditor is an inaccessible editor whereas, ChattyInfty is a fully accessible editor with inbuilt voice output. And InftyReader is an Optical Character Reader ChattyInfty ChattyInfty is an accessible editor with a plug-in for speech interface. It uses Microsoft Speech API, the version 5 (SAPI 5) to provide speech output. Hence, it doesn t require installation of any other screen reader. The documents written in ChattyInfty can be saved in different formats: L A TEX, MathML, PDF, Microsoft Word 2007 and human Readable TEX for the blinds. ChattyInfty also provides an option to read equation letter-by-letter. It also provides lot of customization features in speech and Math-Reading mode setting to give various degree of freedom to user. Even if InftyReader (see section 3.3.2) is installed on the system, one can input texts and math expressions from printed document via scanner into editor directly. Download and Cost One time license fee for ChattyInfty is $400. A trial for 15 days is also available at free of cost. To download please go to the link : InftyReader InftyReader is an OCR (Optical Character Reader) with a good accuracy for scientific content too. It provides output results in L A TEX, HTML, XML, MathML, Word etc. It is developed in view of its application to retro-digitization of mathematical journals, to automatic transcription of scientific documents into Braille codes, etc. InftyReader supports many languages using FineReader plug-in which are: Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish. Download and Cost First year charges are $5000 with a yearly charge of $2000 from the second year onwards. A trial with page number limit of 1 page each time and 5 pages per day is also available at free of cost. One can download it from the below link: Limitations Costly Minimum scanning requirement for good accuracy is 400 DPI Can t read hand written documents 15

18 Chapter 4 Conclusion A lot of organisations, research institutions and universities are working in the direction of developing tools for making scientific content accessible to the partially sighted / visually impaired people. InftyProject has given a very good development but due to its high cost, it is not able to make any change in the life of VI people. MathType and CAR are at the initial level of the making content accessible. There is a huge development requires to meet the target. MathType is converting equation into graphics, which is making element-by-element reading of the equations inaccessible. 16

Advanced Topics in Curricular Accessibility: Strategies for Math and Science Accessibility

Advanced Topics in Curricular Accessibility: Strategies for Math and Science Accessibility Sean Keegan, Stanford University Ron Stewart, Chair AHEAD Instructional Materials Accessibility Group Creative