COV885: Special Module in
Computer Applications
II Semester 2020-21
Name of course: Creating
Accessible Documents for Visually Impaired
Course level: PG - Senior and Research
Instructor: Prof.
Volker Sorge and Prof. M. Balakrishnan
Discipline: Information Technology
Lecture hours: 14 Hours
Pre-requisites: Programming,
Data Structures
Course Description: Persons with visual impairments
are still underrepresented due to inaccessibility of the STEM (Scientific,
Technical, Engineering, and Mathematical) content. STEM document contains a
number of artefacts like table, equations, diagrams, data visualization, etc.
that remain inaccessible as screen readers have primarily focused on plain text.
This course will focus on conversions of various artefacts from inaccessible
formats to accessible formats. Here, accessibility means access to persons with
visual impairments with assistive technologies like screen reader.
Syntactic and semantic analysis are required for the accessibility of the tables
and equations. Syntactic analysis is required to understand the mathematical
relations between the different variables of the equation. On the other hand,
semantic analysis is required to adapt the audio rendering on the basis of the
context to minimize the verbosity and cognitive load. Further, individual user
specific adaptations are required to enhance effectiveness as well as
efficiency of audio rendering. Such adaptations should be based on the
individual user’s experience with audio rendering as well as familiarity with
the content.
Course Contents (# of lecture hours)
Topic |
Contents |
# of hours |
Introduction |
STEM Documents and their features |
2 |
Document sources |
Retro-digitized, born digital and born accessible |
2 |
Formats and conversion |
Physical (paper) and digital and associated conversion challenges |
2 |
Semantics |
Representation, generation and recovery techniques |
2 |
Physical and other accessibility techniques |
Braille, tactile, audio-tactile and haptics |
2 |
Electronic accessibility |
Screen reading, interaction & sonification |
2 |
Personalization |
Adaptations including impairment specific and localization |
2 |
Lab component (if relevant)
There would
be a supplementary laboratory component. Details are available at
http://progressiveaccess.com/empower18/
This would expose the students to
creating accessible equations, chemistry diagrams, physics diagrams and
statistics. On the whole focus would be on generating accessible diagrams.
Software tools & resources:
·
MathJax
·
Pandoc
Reference:
Mainly research papers – key conferences ICCHP and
CSUN
Thesis of Dr. T.V. Raman,
ACM Dissertation Award, Cornell University, 1994