Azadeh Nazemi

Mathspeak: An Audio Method for Presenting Mathematical Formulae to Blind Students

This paper describes the problems involved with learning and understanding math for vision impaired students and developing a computer system approach for rendering mathematical formulae into audio form. Access to mathematics is an obstacle for blind students. The lack of easy access to mathematical resources is a barrier to higher education for many blind students and puts them at an unfair disadvantage in school, academia, and industry [1]. Results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress show that there is great disparity between the math skills of students with disabilities and students without disabilities [2]. A methodology for rendering technical documents, in particular, complex mathematical formula, in an audio descriptive form (Mathspeak) is presented in this paper.

Digital Talking Book Player for the Visually Impaired Using FPGAs

The Digital Talking Book (DTB) player is a device for the visually impaired to read, search, navigate and bookmark written material using DAISY and EPUB standards. This paper presents the design and implementation of a DTB player in an FPGA-based embedded system to play audio books containing MP3 (Daisy) files and utilize Text to Speech Synthesis (TTS) for text only books or EPUB books.

Practical Segmentation Methods for Logical and Geometric Layout Analysis to Improve Scanned PDF Accessibility to Vision Impaired

The use of electronic documents has rapidly increased in recent decades and the PDF is one the most commonly used electronic document formats. A scanned PDF is an image and does not actually contain any text. For the vision–impaired user who is dependent upon a screen reader to access this information, this format is not useful. Thus addressing PDF accessibility through assistive technology has now become an important concern. PDF layout analysis provides precious formatting information that supports PDF component classification. This classification facilitates the tag generation. Accurate tagging produces a searchable and navigable scanned PDF document. This paper describes several practical segmentation methods which are easy to implement and efficient for PDF layout analysis so that the scanned PDF document can be navigated or searched using assistive technologies.

Access to all components of scanned mathematical documents by vision-impaired students

ABSTRACT Vision-impaired people access documents using screen readers. Electronic documents may contain non-textual components, non-linear components, and multidimensional components, such as mathematical expressions and graphs. These components create a number of accessibility issues for those who use screen readers as assistive technology. The research presented here describes mathematical information retrieval, and accessible and navigable representation of mathematical function graphs as solutions to these issues. Additionally, this research study is about how to present course materials to vision-impaired students, and is not about how to teach them. The system shows promise, given an initial evaluation by a vision-impaired person, and an encouraging review by three blind professionals. The next step is to perform a full evaluation of the system employing a larger number of vision-impaired students.

Accessible and Navigable Representation of Mathematical Function Graphs to the Vision-Impaired

Vision-impaired students have several issues accessing mathematical documents, which are associated with representation of mathematical expressions and graphs of mathematical functions. Graphs of mathematical functions are visual presentations of mathematical information and useful to illustrate numerical or qualitative information, which are sometimes difficult or even impossible to describe. A graph is a picture that shows how sets of data are related to each other. Graphs of mathematical functions generally convey the intended message of a mathematical document. Therefore, access to graphs is essential in learning mathematics. Finding a solution to represent graphs of mathematical functions in an accessible format is necessary for the vision-impaired. This paper describes an approach to develop an application to address this issue by detecting, extracting and categorising important information from graphs of mathematical functions using three open source packages, namely, ImageMagick, GNUPLOT and Octave

Unbalanced chemical equations conversion to mark-up format and representation to vision impaired students

This paper describes a method to represent unbalanced chemical equations to vision impaired students which allows them to navigate through classified data, such as species, elements, quantity numbers at the left and right hand sides of equations, reactants, and products. Then they can find appropriate coefficients and balance chemical equations without involving to mathematical aspects of balancing and remembering a lot of information. The goal of this research was the development of an application which assists vision impaired students enrolled in chemistry course to be able to read chemistry literature containing formulae, chemistry representations of elements, and other aspects of chemistry that has been difficult in the past to present in a way for vision impaired people to understand. Developed application by this research is an open source command line Bash Script application under Linux which accepts an unbalanced chemical equation as an input, processes, classifies information, and represents it as Mark‐up format or Alternative Audio Descriptive using Text to Speech.

A method to implement DAISY online delivery protocol

Digital Accessible Information System format (DAISY) is designed for vision impaired users to access to electronic document. The purpose of this project is creating a reliable and free one-way audio link over the Internet to provide low-cost DAISY format transmission, which support vision impaired users to access and listen DAISY books as audio stream through the link. By connecting to this link, clients can save desired files on their own device as much as they listen and they do not have to download entire DAISY book. This paper describes a method to implement the protocol between user station premises and remote broadcasting library server contains DAISY books. The method explains audio signal streaming from one computer to another, by using free open source software.

Mathematical Information Retrieval (MIR) from Scanned PDF Documents and MathML Conversion

This paper describes part of an ongoing comprehensive research project that is aimed at generating a MathML format from images of mathematical expressions that have been extracted from scanned PDF documents. A MathML representation of a scanned PDF document reduces the document’s storage size and encodes the math- ematical notation and meaning. The MathML representation then becomes suitable for vocalization and accessible through the use of assistive technologies. In order to achieve an accurate layout analysis of a scanned PDF document, all textual and non-textual components must be recognised, identified and tagged. These components may be text or mathematical expressions and graphics in the form of images, figures, tables and/or diagrams. Mathematical expres- sions are one of the most significant components within scanned scientific and engineering PDF documents and need to be machine readable for use with assistive technologies. This research is a work in progress and includes multiple different modules: detecting and extracting mathematical expressions, recursive primitive component extraction, non- alphanumerical symbols recognition, structural semantic analysis and merging primitive components to generate the MathML of the scanned PDF document. An optional module converts MathML to audio format using a Text to Speech engine (TTS) to make the document accessible for vision-impaired users. Keywords: math recognition, graphics recognition, Mathematical Informati