Visualization of Accessible Multimedia Content in Web Pages

Multimedia content still presented on the web sites. The visualization of multimedia content by the users with disabilities, those that usually use screen readers, is extremely difficult. With the onset of the audio sequence of multimedia presentation it is difficult for users with visual impairs to listen the audio component of presentation and the audio version of the screen readers too, because the two audio streams cannot be controlled using only one volume control. Therefore, because of the difficulties to control the available audio streams and because of the difficulties to access the control buttons by people with disabilities, the multimedia content is often inaccessible for users with visual problems. More than this, the use of dynamic users’ interfaces is a critical problem because the screen-readers cannot detect the dynamics in content changes. The current paper presents some solutions for multimedia content production and distribution in distributed multimedia web presentations.Accessible multimedia content, Synchronized Accessible Media Interchange

User Attitude Towards Screen Readers: A Finnish Perspective

Prior research on understanding blind people’s attitude toward screen readers has been scant. This paper collected data from six Finnish blind users on their use of screen readers and analyzed the data using an interpretive phenomenological approach in order to find the factors that constitute attitude. The data analysis revealed three major themes: environmental, personal, and technological. Environmental themes include the following subthemes: Use Context, Government and Community Support, and Support from Friends and Family. Personal themes include subthemes of Willingness to Try New Technology, Willingness to Improve Skills, and Attachment to the Screen Readers. Finally, technological themes include Possible Improvements in Screen Readers (e.g., ease of use, slow progress of screen reader technology), Incompatibilities among Technologies, and Difficult to Learn but Training Can Support

BrlAPI: Simple, Portable, Concurrent, Application-level Control of Braille Terminals

Screen readers can drive braille devices for allowing visually impaired users to access computer environments, by providing them the same information as sighted users. But in some cases, this view is not easy to use on a braille device. In such cases, it would be much more useful to let applications provide their own braille feedback, specially adapted to visually impaired users. Such applications would then need the ability to output braille ; however, allowing both screen readers and applications access a wide panel of braille devices is not a trivial task. We present an abstraction layer that applications may use to communicate with braille devices. They do not need to deal with the specificities of each device, but can do so if necessary. We show how several applications can communicate with one braille device concurrently, with BrlAPI making sensible choices about which application eventually gets access to the device. The description of a widely used implementation of BrlAPI is included

UEFI BIOS Accessibility for the Visually Impaired

People with some kind of disability face a high level of difficulty for everyday tasks because, in many cases, accessibility was not considered necessary when the task or process was designed. An example of this scenario is a computer's BIOS configuration screens, which do not consider the specific needs, such as screen readers, of visually impaired people. This paper proposes the idea that it is possible to make the pre-operating system environment accessible to visually impaired people. We report our work-in-progress in creating a screen reader prototype, accessing audio cards compatible with the High Definition Audio specification in systems running UEFI compliant firmware.Comment: 6 page

Investigation of accessibility of electronic music resources for the visually impaired

The number of students at Western Michigan University (WMU) who require accommodation for disabilities has been increasing in recent years, and is expected to continue to increase in the future. While the University Libraries tries to be responsive to all types of accommodations, students with visual impairments present a particular challenge for libraries to ensure their electronic resources are accessible. Most visually impaired students utilize “screen readers,” software programs that use a speech synthesizer to “read” the text that is displayed on the screen, to navigate web based resources. In an effort to try to better understand how specific screen readers work with our library electronic resources we employed a visually impaired student who is a sophisticated user of screen readers to test our electronic resources.Using a combination of browsers and operating systems, we used Job Access With Speech (JAWS), the most widely used screen reader, and NonVisual Desktop Access (NVDA), an open source screen reader, to test our website, our discovery layer and selected music databases. Databases tested include Music Periodicals Database (ProQuest), RILM Abstracts of Music Literature (EBSCO), and Grove Music Online. As WMU Libraries uses the ExLibris Primo discovery product, our instance of Primo was also tested for accessibility. The presenters will share the findings of the screen reader testing, including a pre-recorded demonstration of a visually impaired student conducting searches with screen readers, and describe our experiences in investigating accessibility of our electronic resources for visually impaired students. Presenters will also make recommendations for improving electronic resources and library services, in general, to better meet the needs of visually impaired patrons

Designing an Accessible Web Technology

This project considered the limitations of accessibility in web technology and screen readers. It was an attempt to create a framework for building web pages and applications that would have accessibility built in and make development easier. It also involved building a prototype screen navigator that demonstrated ways of overcoming the shortcomings of current screen readers. The final demonstration was an email web client built using this framework. The purpose of the email web application was to explore the viability, benefits and limitations of the framework’s method of creating web applications, and to test the usefulness of the prototype screen navigator. The findings for the framework were that it has benefits, for both the users of assistive technologies and developers, but there remain gaps, ideas and questions for further exploration. The prototype navigator made interacting with the dynamic application fairly easy and efficient

Aprendizado de máquina aplicado para melhorar a acessibilidade de documentos PDF para usuários com deficiência visual

Orientador: Luiz Cesar MartiniDissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Faculdade de Engenharia Elétrica e de ComputaçãoResumo: Os documentos digitais são acessados por pessoas com deficiência visual (VIP) por meio de leitores de tela. Tradicionalmente, os documentos digitais eram traduzidos para texto em braille, mas os leitores de tela provaram ser eficientes para a aquisição de conhecimento para as VIP. No entanto, os leitores de tela e outras tecnologias assistivas têm limitações significativas quando existem tabelas em documentos digitais como os documentos PDF (Portable Document Format). Por exemplo, os leitores de tela não podem seguir a sequência de leitura correta da tabela com base em sua estrutura visual causando que esse conteúdo seja inacessível aos VIP. Para lidar com esse problema, neste trabalho, desenvolvemos um sistema para a recuperação de informações de tabela de documentos PDF para uso em leitores de tela usados por pessoas com deficiência visual. A metodologia proposta aproveita as técnicas de visão computacional com uma abordagem de aprendizado profundo para tornar os documentos acessíveis em vez da abordagem clássica de programação baseada em regras. Explicamos em detalhe a metodologia que usamos e como avaliar objetivamente a abordagem por meio de métricas de entropia, ganho de informação e pureza. Os resultados mostram que nossa metodologia proposta pode ser usada para reduzir a incerteza experimentada por pessoas com deficiência visual ao ouvir o conteúdo das tabelas em documentos digitais através de leitores de tela. Nosso sistema de recuperação de informações de tabela apresenta duas melhorias em comparação com as abordagens tradicionais de marcação de arquivos PDF. Primeiro, nossa abordagem não requer supervisão de pessoas com visão. Segundo, nosso sistema é capaz de trabalhar com PDFs baseados em imagem e em textoAbstract: Digital documents are accessed by visually impaired people (VIP) through screen readers. Traditionally, digital documents were translated to braille text, but screen readers have proved to be efficient for the acquisition of digital document knowledge by VIP. However, screen readers and other assistive technologies have significant limitations when there exist tables in digital documents such as portable document format (PDF). For instance, screen readers can not follow the correct reading sequence of the table based on its visual structure causing this content is inaccessible for VIP. In order to deal with this problem, in this work, we developed a system for the retrieval of table information from PDF documents for use in screen readers used by visually impaired people. The proposed methodology takes advantage of computer vision techniques with a deep learning approach to make documents accessible instead of the classical rule-based programming approach. We explained in detail the methodology that we used and how to objectively evaluate the approach through entropy, information gain, and purity metrics. The results show that our proposed methodology can be used to reduce the uncertainty experienced by visually impaired people when listening to the contents of tables in digital documents through screen readers. Our table information retrieval system presents two improvements compared with traditional approaches of tagging text-based PDF files. First, our approach does not require supervision by sighted people. Second, our system is capable of working with image-based as well as text-based PDFsMestradoEngenharia de ComputaçãoMestre em Engenharia Elétric

Creating Structured PDF Files Using XML Templates

This paper describes a tool for recombining the logical structure from an XML document with the typeset appearance of the corresponding PDF document. The tool uses the XML representation as a template for the insertion of the logical structure into the existing PDF document, thereby creating a Structured/Tagged PDF. The addition of logical structure adds value to the PDF in three ways: the accessibility is improved (PDF screen readers for visually impaired users perform better), media options are enhanced (the ability to reflow PDF documents, using structure as a guide, makes PDF viable for use on hand-held devices) and the re-usability of the PDF documents benefits greatly from the presence of an XML-like structure tree to guide the process of text retrieval in reading order (e.g. when interfacing to XML applications and databases)