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Abstract
Reading scientific content within digital documents is often challenging for people with visual impairments. Text information can be easily engaged with by means of assistive tools such as refreshable braille displays or screen readers. However, mathematical formulae or graphs are difficult to translate into a screen-readable form while preserving the expressiveness of the original format. Providing broadly usable content is a burden left to document authors, which requires substantial time and effort. Document authors are also frequently unaware of the need for document usability, and they may not have the required know-how to create blind-friendly documents. Thus, scientific content is rarely provided in a blind-friendly format, which creates a barrier to the availability of STEM education and employment for people with visual impairments.
At the laboratory "S. Polin" of the University of Turin, Italy, our research focuses on assistive technologies to enable use of digital documents with scientific content for people with visual impairments. I will present two of our most recent works: Axessibility is a LaTeX package for generating PDF documents in which mathematical formulae are usable by people with visual impairments using braille displays or screen readers, without requiring the author to add blind-friendly content manually. AudioFunctions.web is a web-based system that enables blind people to explore mathematical function graphs, using sonification, earcons, and speech synthesis to convey the overall shape of the function graph, its key points of interest, is accurate quantitative information at any given point.