SBIR-STTR Award

The long range goal of this project is to create technologies that permit authors and publishers of professional journals easily to make their content available in a form that is fully usable by all people, in particular by people who are blind or have other severe print disabilities. The specific aim of this Phase I SBIR project is to assess the feasibility of automatic transformation of current journals published by the American Physical Society into DAISY (Digital Accessible Information SYstem) format. DAISY (http://www.DAISY.org) is an international standard for electronic documents accessible to all people, but in particular to people with disabilities who cannot read normal printed materials. The PI was a member of the DAISY working group that recently expanded the DAISY specifications to include math in form of the MathML markup language and is a member of the current DAISY working group developing guidelines for including graphical information as accessible Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). As part of this proposal, DAISY prototypes will be created for all articles in a recent issue of Physical Review Letters, the flagship journal of the American Physical Society. These prototypes will be complete with fully accessible text, math, and graphics. Text and math access should be excellent. The greatest challenge is making the graphics accessible. ViewPlus has already developed technologies that make possible universal access to graphical information in well-structured annotated SVG format. Automatic conversion of current APS content would include no annotations, so some figures would not be excellently accessible. If automatic conversion gives acceptable access to most content, it is feasible to provide current APS and possibly many other professional society journals in accessible form. Human editors could quickly improve figures on demand to add annotations and correct text errors. Improved accessibility to automatically converted content is achievable in the future with improved authoring and publishing technologies. This project could stimulate vast improvements in accessibility by people with print disabilities to technical publications and any other literature in which graphical information is important. Better information access obviously can lead to improvement in educational and professional opportunities and quality of life for people who are blind or have other severe print disabilities. Quality of life issues for blind people are part of the mission of the National Eye Institute.This proposal is relevant to the mission of the National Eye Institute, because it could lead to making scientific professional journals available to blind professionals immediately on publication without need for intervention by human assistants. It should also increase pressure on other publishers to make their literature universally accessible. This achievement would have an obviously highly beneficial direct effect on education and professional opportunities, mental health, and quality of life of blind people. Mental health and quality of life issues for blind people are parts of the mission of the National Eye Institute.

Thesaurus Terms:
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The long range goal of this project is to create technologies that permit authors and publishers of professional journals to make their content available in the DAISY (Digital Accessible Information System) XML (eXtensible Markup Language) format that is fully usable by all people, in particular by people who are blind or have other severe print disabilities. The Phase I collaboration between the American Physical Society (APS) and ViewPlus demonstrated conclusively that transformation of the text and math from the current APS format to DAISY XML is straightforward, and only minimal editorial time is required to transform figures to the accessible DAISY SVG (Scalable Vector Graphic) format. The specific aim of this Phase II SBIR project is to develop publishing software and procedures permitting present content to be repurposed so that at least minimal quality DAISY XML journal articles can be made available immediately. The APS is expected to implement the new publishing method first and then be followed by other scholarly publishers. Several other software applications will also be developed that enable authors to submit figures directly in high quality DAISY SVG form so that future DAISY XML publications will be much more than minimal. DAISY SVG figures can: "contain all the data illustrated in the figure" contain meta data facilitating much improved classification by digital libraries "be excellently searchable. These mainstream advantages of DAISY SVG are substantial and are very likely to lead authors of scholarly literature to quickly adopt DAISY SVG as their format of choice. As part of the Phase I project, DAISY prototypes were created for all articles in a recent issue of Physical Review Letters, the flagship journal of the American Physical Society. These prototypes were complete with fully accessible text, math, and graphics. They were demonstrated at three 2008 professional meetings of scholarly publishers and librarians to rave reviews. Text and math is spoken by a screen reader. DAISY SVG figures appear in the DAISY article and are available as SVG links to blind users. Exercising the link opens the figure in the IVEO SVG Viewer. A blind user creates a tactile copy on any ViewPlus embosser, places it on a touchpad, and "reads" the text labels and titles and descriptions of graphical elements by pressing on their tactile image and hearing them spoken by the IVEO SVG Viewer application. This audio- tactile access method is known to provide blind people excellent access to figures. This new publishing paradigm would vastly improve accessibility by people with print disabilities to scholarly publications and lead to improvements in their educational and professional opportunities and quality of life. Quality of life issues for blind people are part of the mission of the National Eye Institute.

Public Health Relevance Statement:
This proposal is relevant to the mission of the National Eye Institute, because it could lead to making scholarly journals available to blind professionals immediately on publication without need for intervention by human assistants. This achievement would have an obviously highly beneficial direct effect on education and professional opportunities, mental health, and quality of life of blind people. Mental health and quality of life issues for blind people are parts of the National Eye Institute mission.

Project Terms:
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