Blind individuals primarily access mathematical content using a Braille display. While speech output is commonly employed for normal texts, the reception of mathematical formulas requires precise identification of individual symbols. In the past, multiple Braille math notations emerged, but their differences mean many blind users learn only one, hindering communication between blind and sighted people. This paper introduces a program that converts between major Braille math notations bidirectionally. In addition, the program also translates to mathematical notations commonly used by sighted readers to facilitate communication among blind users.

This paper introduces the Special Thematic Session (STS) on New Methods for Creating Accessible Material in Higher Education [1]. Inclusive education, as mandated by the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, demands universities to provide accessible study conditions. However, many study materials lack accessibility especially for visual content such as graphics and there are only few universities that offer a regular literature transfer service. Therefore, most students have to create solutions themselves. It is therefore necessary to develop new standardized methods and tools that make it easier for students with visual impairments and print disabilities to access visual and STEM content of teaching material and exams e.g. by generating captions of charts, providing standardized descriptions and making graphics available tactilely.

Design workshops are often inaccessible to blind people due to a strong reliance on visual design methods. This paper presents an adapted low-fidelity prototyping method to enable blind persons to actively participate in the early design stages of developing assistive devices. We chose the development of a 2D tactile display as a case study. Therefore, we conducted four workshops with blind participants to develop a haptic toolkit and adapt the structure of prototyping workshops based on the preferences of the target group. The resulting toolkit and workshop structure were applied in six prototyping workshops with 12 blind participants to design a new 2D tactile display to test the new method. Our findings show that the participation of blind individuals is highly relevant for structuring accessible prototyping workshops, deciding group size, and developing accessible prototyping materials. Furthermore, our work lays the foundation for further investigation of the role of sighted assistants and the design of workshops that truly center blind persons as primary contributors.

Ensuring that electronic books (eBooks) are inclusive and accessible to all readers, including people who are blind or have low-vision, is crucial for promoting equal opportunities in education and information access. In this paper, we explore the potential use of 2D refreshable tactile displays to convey eBooks for people who are blind or have low-vision. Therefore, we introduce a design of an eBook reader that incorporates interaction concepts derived from suggestions in the existing literature on how eBook readers can be customized for this target group. In addition, we followed a participatory design approach by involving blind users in a preliminary study. We integrated their feedback along with their suggestions for improving the interactions and the representation methods implemented in the reader. This paper discusses the design decisions and presents users’ suggestions and feedback gathered during our preliminary study. It also highlights our insights for future work in developing user interfaces and interaction concepts for 2D refreshable tactile displays.

Exam documents are essential educational materials for exam preparation. However, they pose a significant academic barrier for blind and visually impaired students, as they are often created without accessibility considerations. Typically, these documents are incompatible with screen readers, contain excessive white space, and lack alternative text for visual elements. This situation frequently requires intervention by experienced sighted individuals to modify the format and content for accessibility. We propose ACCSAMS, a semi-automatic system designed to enhance the accessibility of exam documents. Our system offers three key contributions: (1) creating an accessible layout and removing unnecessary white space, (2) adding navigational structures, and (3) incorporating alternative text for visual elements that were previously missing. Additionally, we present the first multilingual manually annotated dataset, comprising 1,293 German and 900 English exam documents which could serve as a good training source for deep learning models.

Phishing is an ever increasing danger that threaten both sighted and visually impaired users. Yet, most of the research in this field focuses on sighted users, even though visually impaired people are equally threatened by phishing attacks. To help visually impaired people detect phishing attacks, we propose here an initial version of a novel tool, SMILE4VIP. SMILE4VIP builds on the results obtained by other tools with sighted users, and adapt their solutions to visually impaired people. We ran a preliminary online feedback study with $N$ = 4 visually impaired participants to investigate their thoughts on both our tool and our study design. Although the tool was well received, we received several interesting feedback on both the tool and the study itself. We plan to implement the feedback on both, and then run a larger scale user study to determine the effectiveness of SMILE4VIP.

Nowadays, most digital documents are available in the form of PDF files. The main problem, however, is that there are hardly any tools that automatically generate accessible PDFs, which is why they have to be made accessible. In a study with nine participants, we investigate the usability of three tools (Adobe Acrobat Pro, Axes and PAVE), used for making PDFs accessible. Our results show that the SUS score of PAVE is best, followed by AXES and Acrobat. None of the three tools, however, achieves an SUS score above 50 and therefore need improvements. The qualitative analysis points at three main problems: (i) users felt lost and do not know what to do, (ii) there is no or insufficient possibility to track changes and (iii) the interfaces are not easy to use.

This paper introduces the Special Thematic Session (STS) on New Methods for Creating Accessible Material in Higher Education [1]. Inclusive education, as mandated by the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, demands universities to provide accessible study conditions. However, many study materials lack accessibility especially for visual content such as graphics and there are only few universities that offer a transfer service. Therefore, most students have to create solutions themselves. It is therefore necessary to develop new standardized methods that make it easier for students with visual impairments to access visual content of teaching material and exams e.g. by generating captions of charts, providing standardized descriptions and making graphics available tactilely.

Alternative Texts (Alt-Text) for chart images are essential for making graphics accessible to people with blindness and visual impairments. Traditionally, Alt-Text is manually written by authors but often encounters issues such as oversimplification or complication. Recent trends have seen the use of AI for Alt-Text generation. However, existing models are susceptible to producing inaccurate or misleading information. We address this challenge by retrieving high-quality alt-texts from similar chart images, serving as a reference for the user when creating alt-texts. Our three contributions are as follows: (1) we introduce a new benchmark comprising 5,000 real images with semantically labeled high-quality Alt-Texts, collected from Human Computer Interaction venues. (2) We developed a deep learning-based model to rank and retrieve similar chart images that share the same visual and textual semantics. (3) We designed a user interface (UI) to facilitate the alt-text creation process. Our preliminary interviews and investigations highlight the usability of our UI. For the dataset and further details, please refer to our project page: https://moured.github.io/alt4blind/.

Understanding document layouts is vital for enhancing document exploration and information retrieval for sighted individuals. However, for blind and visually impaired people, it becomes challenging to have access to layout information using typical assistive technologies such as screen readers. In this paper, we examine the potential benefits of presenting documents on two-dimensional (2D) refreshable tactile displays. These displays enable the tactile perception of 2D data, offering the advantage of dynamic and interactive functionality. Despite their potential, the development of user interfaces (UIs) for such displays has not advanced significantly. Thus, we propose a design of an intelligent tactile user interface (TUI), incorporating touch and audio feedback to represent documents in a tactile format. Our exploratory study for evaluating this approach revealed satisfaction from participants with the experience of directly viewing documents in their true form, rather than relying on screen-reading interpretations. Additionally, participants offered recommendations for incorporating additional features and refining the approach in future iterations. To facilitate further research and development, we have made our dataset and models publicly available.

Visualizations, such as charts, are crucial for interpreting complex data. However, they are often provided as raster images, which are not compatible with assistive technologies for people with blindness and visual impairments, such as embossed papers or tactile displays. At the same time, creating accessible vector graphics requires a skilled sighted person and is time-intensive. In this work, we leverage advancements in the field of chart analysis to generate tactile charts in an end-to-end manner. Our three key contributions are as follows: (1) introducing the ChartFormer model trained to convert raster chart images into tactile-accessible SVGs, (2) training this model on the Chart2Tactile dataset, a synthetic chart dataset we created following accessibility standards, and (3) evaluating the effectiveness of our SVGs through a pilot user study with an refreshable two-dimensional tactile display. Our work is publicly available at https://github.com/nsothman/ChartFormer .

This paper introduces the Special Thematic Session (STS) on New Methods for Creating Accessible Material in Higher Education [1]. Inclusive education, as mandated by the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, demands universities to provide accessible study conditions. However, many study materials lack accessibility especially for visual content such as graphics and there are only few universities that offer a transfer service. Therefore, most students have to create solutions themselves. It is therefore necessary to develop new standardized methods that make it easier for students with visual impairments to access visual content of teaching material and exams e.g. by generating captions of charts, providing standardized descriptions and making graphics available tactilely.

Pinpointing elements on large tactile surfaces is challenging for individuals with blindness and visual impairment (BVI) seeking to access two-dimensional (2D) information. This is particularly evident when using 2D tactile readers, devices designed to provide 2D information using static tactile representations with audio explanations. Traditional pinpointing methods, such as sighted assistance and trial-and-error, are limited and inefficient, while alternative pinpointing user interfaces (UI) are still emerging and need advancement. To address these limitations, we develop three distinct navigation UIs using a user-centred design approach: Sonar (proximity-radar sonification), Voice (direct clock-system speech instructions), and Sonoice, a new method that combines elements of both. The navigation UIs were incorporated into the Tactonom Reader device to conduct a trial study with ten BVI participants. Our UIs exhibited superior performance and higher user satisfaction than the conventional trial-and-error approach, showcasing scalability to varied assistive technology and their effectiveness regardless of graphic complexity. The innovative Sonoice approach achieved the highest efficiency in pinpointing elements, but user satisfaction was highest with the Sonar approach. Surprisingly, participant preferences varied and did not always align with their most effective strategy, underscoring the importance of accommodating individual user preferences and contextual factors when choosing between the three UIs. While more extensive training may reveal further differences between these UIs, our results emphasise the significance of offering diverse options to meet user needs. Altogether, the results provide valuable insights for improving the functionality of 2D tactile readers, thereby contributing to the future development of accessible technology.

Making technical diagrams accessible for individuals who are blind or visually impaired (BVI) continues to pose a challenge. Numerous researchers have explored the potential of utilizing vector graphics to improve the accessibility of such diagrams. Vector graphics offer many advantages due to their ability to scale without loss of information and their capacity to store shapes and metadata in a structured manner. This paper presents a new tactile interface designed to transform technical diagrams in Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format into a tactile format. The interface allows BVI individuals to explore technical diagrams more effectively by utilizing haptic interactions on 2D refreshable tactile displays. Through a formal user study with five blind participants, we show that most participants could effectively understand and interact with the diagrams using the proposed interface and interactions. Furthermore, all the participants preferred the proposed approach over existing methods, such as textual descriptions and embossed tactile papers. For more information and demos, please visit our project’s webpage https://moured.github.io/touch4accessibility/

Visual representations are widely used for conveying information for sighted people. However, these visualizations are often inaccessible to blind people, requiring special adaptations. Especially in higher education, it is vital to support the learning process how to explore graphics. Although the description of graphics is a solution to make them accessible, there are only few standards for descriptions for this target group. In this paper, we develop a standard for describing function graphs at the university level in a user-centered multi-stage design process, focusing on structuring the information for blind readers and guiding authors to include necessary details to avoid errors.

In a world driven by data visualization, ensuring the inclusive accessibility of charts for Blind and Visually Impaired (BVI) individuals remains a significant challenge. Charts are usually presented as raster graphics without textual and visual metadata needed for an equivalent exploration experience for BVI people. Additionally, converting these charts into accessible formats requires considerable effort from sighted individuals. Digitizing charts with metadata extraction is just one aspect of the issue; transforming it into accessible modalities, such as tactile graphics, presents another difficulty. To address these disparities, we propose Chart4Blind, an intelligent user interface that converts bitmap image representations of line charts into universally accessible formats. Chart4Blind achieves this transformation by generating Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), Comma-Separated Values (CSV), and alternative text exports, all comply with established accessibility standards. Through interviews and a formal user study, we demonstrate that even inexperienced sighted users can make charts accessible in an average of 4 minutes using Chart4Blind, achieving a System Usability Scale rating of 90%. In comparison to existing approaches, Chart4Blind provides a comprehensive solution, generating end-to-end accessible SVGs suitable for assistive technologies such as embossed prints (papers and laser cut), 2D tactile displays, and screen readers. For additional information, including open-source codes and demos, please visit our project page https://moured.github.io/chart4blind/.

Reading and processing documents is a challenging task for people with blindness and visual impairment (BVI). Despite various methods and research being conducted on converting text and multimedia content to an accessible format, the task of layout navigation remains under-explored. Within a document, a demanding task for people with BVI is to understand the layout and navigate, so as to form a proper reading order. This is specifically challenging in documents with complex layouts, such as those with multiple columns and arbitrarily distributed elements. Traditional methods, such as screen readers, can be limited in their ability to navigate complex layouts and unreliable for various types of documents such as newspapers and slides. A new tactile layout reader has been developed in this work to enhance document navigation by providing pinpointed audio-tactile explanations. Our approach, as shown in Figure 1, uses state-of-the-art AI object detection to create a high-level abstract of the document structure, and an optimized interface suitable for both 2D refreshable displays and braille-embossed documents, with both audio and tactile representations. In order to enable the research community and contribute to the field, we will make our codes, models, and annotated data publicly available.

Two-dimensional(2d) data access is crucial in connecting people with blindness and visual impairment (BVI) with the rest of the world. Such 2d information includes, for example, floor plans of train stations provided by transportation networks to help travellers navigate and understand a train station and its surroundings, but these documents are not yet accessible. Existing assistive technologies, such as 2d pin-matrix displays, offer new possibilities here to present 2d information via a refreshable tactile pin-matrix display and audio feedback. However, user interfaces that enable people with BVI to perceive the shape and content of information are still not yet fully functional and explored. This paper presents a workflow for converting PDF files of station floor plans provided by transportation networks into an accessible Scalable Vector Graphics format (SVG). Those files are not only usable for 2d pin-matrix displays but can also be printed on swell paper or can be embossed and used in 2d tactile graphic readers. Moreover, we propose a new user interface for 2d refreshable pin-matrix devices that enables people with BVI to interact with train station floor plans. This user interface was implemented for Inventivio GmbH’s Tactonom pin-matrix device (V1) and supports moving, navigating to elements and zooming in SVG train station map documents. Further work includes implementing new features to reduce the complexity and information overload on a tactile surface.