@Science: a network about science accessibility for university students

At present, visually impaired students are strongly discouraged to attend university scientific studies, especially because of the lack of scientific resources fully accessible through assistive technologies, the difficulty to attend scientific university lectures based on explanations employing transparencies with mathematical expressions as well as graphical representations and the tools to work on mathematical expressions, which are often partially usable or incomplete for advanced subjects. Furthermore, the variety all over Europe of national braille codes to represent mathematical expressions and the language dependence of audio books recorded by human readers make difficult a cross country exchange of knowledge and resources. Some universities have been working on the improvement of assistive technologies in science learning for many years and they have collected best experiences, tools, accessible scientific resources and effective and efficient methods. Unfortunately, up to now many of these best practices and educational resources haven't got widespread all over Europe. In order to share knowledge among universities about science accessibility by visually impaired people and to produce guidelines and to document best practices, the @Science thematic network was established. It is supported for two years by the European Union eContent- Plus Programme. It involves six founding members from five European countries: Italy, Austria, Slovakia, Belgium and France. In the project lifetime, collaboration actions will be undertaken so as to involve in the thematic network other universities, software and hardware manufacturers, publishers, associations for visually impaired persons and students themselves. In so doing, each group will contribute with its experience and will gain knowledge from other experiences. Moreover, the guidelines and best practices will be the result of a two years exchange of knowledge among experts and end users. At first, this paper will introduce the main barriers which affect blind students in going through scientific studies. Then, it will present the objectives and the methodology of the @Science network

μGraph: Haptic Exploration and Editing of 3D Chemical Diagrams

People with visual impairments or blindness (VIB) encounter diffculties in exploring graphical representations that are widely used for the study of STEM subjects. In particular, graphs are used to represent many different scientifc notations: fowcharts, automata, cognitive maps, and more. Among these, structural chemical formulae are characterized by a complex, often 3-dimensional structure, which makes them hard to access and author with traditional assistive tools. We propose \ub5Graph, a multimodal system that combines haptic and speech feedback to enable people with VIB to explore and edit structural chemical formulae. Two main contributions are presented: (i) a novel, non-visual interaction paradigm for exploring graphs and its implementation in the \ub5Graph system, and (ii) an extensive evaluation of the proposed system with 10 participants with VIB showing that \ub5Graph is thoroughly accessible and that the haptic feedback enhances understanding of the geometric properties of a graph

TACTILE GRAPHICS WITH MATHEMATICA

Tactile diagrams require considering specific features like resolution, size, density and even fonts to be perceived properly. Mathematica, as a powerful tool, provides integrated environment for technical computing, and has introduced a new generation of mathematical and algebraic capabilities. By the way, by default it does not respect the features necessary for graphs to be drawn to be fully tactile perceivable. In this paper, we have studied different aspects of graphing with the package and have investigated a criterion regarding the density feature for the drawn graphs to be judged how far are tactile perceivable

WordMelodies: supporting children with visual impairment in learning literacy

We present WordMelodies, an inclusive, cross platform, mobile app that supports children with visual impairments in the acquisition of basic literacy skills through 8 different exercises. WordMelodies has been designed and evaluated by three domain experts in assistive technologies and education for children with visual impairments. After three design and evaluation iterations the app is fully accessible, except for one limitation of the cross platform development toolkit used

AudioFunctions.web: Multimodal Exploration of Mathematical Function Graphs

We present AudioFunctions.web, a web app that uses sonifcation, earcons and speech synthesis to enable blind people to explore mathematical function graphs. The system is designed for personalized access through different interfaces (touchscreen, keyboard, touchpad and mouse) on both mobile and traditional devices, in order to better adapt to different user abilities and preferences. It is also publicly available as a web service and can be directly accessed from the teaching material through a hypertext link. An experimental evaluation with 13 visually impaired participants highlights that, while the usability of all the presented interaction modalities is high, users with different abilities prefer different interfaces to interact with the system. It is also shown that users with higher level of mathematical education are capable of better adapting to interaction modalities considered more diffcult by others

Towards Large Scale Evaluation of Novel Sonification Techniques for Non Visual Shape Exploration

© 2015 ACM.There are several situations in which a person with visual impairment or blindness needs to extract information from an image. Examples include everyday activities, like reading a map, as well as educational activities, like exercises to develop visuospatial skills. In this contribution we propose a set of 6 sonification techniques to recognize simple shapes on touchscreen devices. The effectiveness of these sonification techniques is evaluated though Invisible Puzzle, a mobile application that makes it possible to conduct non-supervised evaluation sessions. Invisible Puzzle adopts a gamification approach and is a preliminary step in the development of a complete game that will make it possible to conduct a large scale evaluation with hundreds or thousands of blind users. With Invisible Puzzle we conducted 131 tests with sighted subjects and 18 tests with subjects with blindness. All subjects involved in the process successfully completed the evaluation session, with high engagement, hence showing the effectiveness of the evaluation procedure. Results give interesting insights on the differences among the sonification techniques and, most importantly, show that, after a short training, subjects are able to identify many different shapes

Accessible Mathematics on Touchscreen Devices: New Opportunities for People with Visual Impairments

In recent years educational applications for touchscreen devices (e.g., tablets) become widespread all over the world. While these devices are accessible to people with visual impairments, educational applications to support learning of STEM subjects are often not accessible to visually impaired people due to inaccessible graphics. This contribution addresses the problem of conveying graphics to visual impaired users. Two approaches are taken into account: audio icons and image sonification. In order to evaluate the applicability of these approaches, we report our experience in the development of two didactic applications for touchscreen devices, specifically designed to support people with visual impairments or blindness while studying STEM subjects: Math Melodies and Audio Functions. The former is a commercial application to support children in primary school in an inclusive class. It adopts an interaction paradigm based on audio icons. The latter is a prototype application aimed at enabling visually impaired students to explore function diagrams and adopts an image sonification approach