07462 Abstracts Collection -- Assisted Living Systems - Models, Architectures and Engineering Approaches

From 11.11. to 17.11.2007, the Dagstuhl Seminar 07462 ``Assisted Living Systems - Models, Architectures and Engineering Approaches\u27\u27 was held in the International Conference and Research Center (IBFI), Schloss Dagstuhl. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section describes the seminar topics and goals in general. Links to extended abstracts or full papers are provided, if available

Access to Mathematics by Blind Students: A Global Problem,

Abstract The issue of blindness and legally blind is becoming a global issue. Based on the last statistics from American Foundation for the blind, there are approximately 10 million blind and visually impaired people in the United States alone. Over 45 million people around the world are completely blind. 180 million more people are legally blind, and approximately 7 million people are diagnosed as blind or legally blind every year. One of the greatest stumbling blocks in the ability of the blind to enter careers in science, technology, engineering or mathematics is the paucity of tools to help them read and write equations. Over the years there have been numerous projects around the world with the goal of building special tools to help the visually impaired student read and write equations. In the current work, we describe some of the most interesting work in this domain and then attempt to make recommendations and/or predictions about the future