[Blindmath] Automated production of braille math -- Step One: Digitization

Sat Jul 16 22:29:01 UTC 2011

Susan

All fantastic points.
I probably won't use this directly in my upcoming presentation to
students. However, as a final project of my EASI certification
(http://easi.cc), I have agreed with Prof. Norm Coombs (one of the
guys behind A2S) to produce a math accessibility course for academic
staff.
I expect to work on that in the weeks following my NFB presentation,
and these types of posts are a goldmine for such a project.
I've always got the feeling that costs have remained artificially
high, mainly through lack of knowledge, lack of collaboration and, may
be understandably, through throwing the ad-hoc sighted reader at the
problem and solving it that way.
There's nothing wrong with having a good reader as a stop-gap solution
(after all they provide instant access to the text material for the
student and are, in the short term, cheaper at $20 an hour or less
than paying for manual braille transcription, say) , but once blind
students/professionals who rely solely on this method of learning
math, enter a place in their career where this can't be done, they end
up like a fish out of water.
Whether it is this, a problems at an earlier stage or the general mind
set of blind students, it is also a fact that a tiny percentage of
blind students actually end up in STEM related fields (I have numbers,
I believe less than 1% of VI students who enter university graduate
with a STEM related PHD), so the general perception is that, on the
grand scale of things, STEM accessibility is simply not a very
important issue.
But, enough of that, that's policy stuff and your post is practical,
which is something I can work with, I have to leave policies,
ideologies and  establishing frameworks to others.
In my earlier posts inquiring about obtaining existing Braille copies,
I am certainly not advocating this solution, and  I am fully on board
with a one-source solution that fits different disability groups
(after all, that way you can create a larger consumer group and,
therefore, a more significant market of users, that may encourage
publishers and other content creators to consider the direct benefits
of making their materials available to all).
However, I want to present the NFB students with a set of possible
solutions for when they may be stranded in their first year course,
perhaps with unhelpful DSS staff and falling behind on their
classwork. In this scenario I want them to try everything, including
obtaining older copies of hardcopy braille material, if it gets them
through the course. I will place emphasis on the fact that this is not
ideal, and a significant portion of my presentation will be an
encouragement to advocate and to ask for accessible electronic
documents, pressure both publishers, DSS staff and Assistive
Technology vendors, if necessary, to show this is important to them.
Cheers and keep the posts coming.
Birkir

On 7/16/11, Susan Jolly <easjolly at ix.netcom.com> wrote:
> Several people have recently pointed out that producing braille math
> textbooks
> can be very expensive and time-consuming. I'd like to explore some of the
> reasons.
>
> There can be two steps to automated production of braille.  Unless the
> original document
> is "born digital," the first step is converting a paper document to
> an electronic format.  Once an electronic document is available, it is
> potentially possible to automatically
> transcribe that document to braille. I'm going to discuss digitization in
> this email and address automated transcription
> later. I suggested that any feedback recognize this distinction as well.
>
> (Note that my impression is that many sighted braille transcribers still
> find it easier to mentally transcribe and directly enter braille math rather
> than using automated tools. I'm guessing this approach accounts for part of
> the current cost.)
>
> There is no getting around the fact that it does cost something to convert a
> technical document
> available only in printed on paper form to an accurate electronic format, be
> it LaTeX or MathML or some other format.
>
> However, there are many commercial organizations which are experts in this
> process and
> there are many places where one can outsource the conversion of paper
> documents
> to electronic format. One good company is River Valley Technologies, located
> in Kerala, India, which uses tex4ht in their workflow.  (By the way, this is
> the
> same software that Michael W. recently posted instructions on the use of and
> River Valley
> is probably the world expert in tex4ht.)  http://river-valley.com/
> Another good company, which is here in the US, is Data Conversion
> Laboratory.
> http://www.dclab.com/
>
> By the way, I've named particular commercial organizations for two reasons.
> First,  I've gotten the
> impression that the poor quality of some NIMAS files may have led to the
> impression that producing accurate electronic documents isn't feasible
> whereas I don't think that is true. Second, the names could be a useful
> starting point for research by producers of accessible materials.
>
> An alternative to outsourcing is to do one's own scanning and to use
> InftyReader for math OCR to either LaTeX or MathML. I don't have any
> experience with InftyReader so don't have any estimates as to how long it
> would take a properly-trained person to prepare an acceptable electronic
> document using this software.  (I realize that different content would take
> different times.)
>
> I should point out here that the efficiency of digitization has  recently
> been increasing dramatically because so many libraries are digitizing their
> entire collections.  There are now scanners that can automatically scan
> entire books either without damaging valuable fragile books or by first
> chopping a paper copy that has no intrinsic value.  There is also commercial
> software such as the oXygen XML editor that makes it easy to add and edit
> markup as well as compare marked-up files. (A copy of this software for
> academic or non-commercial use can be obtained for $64.)
>
> To summarize, there is a growing amount of expertise in converting printed
> technical documents to electronic format that is likely not being leveraged
> in the production of braille materials. So this issue needs to be addressed.
> I don't see much value to addressing the cost of artifacts of less than
> optimal solutions.  For example, someone mentioned that a braille version of
> a book might be an older edition.  However, if there were an accurate
> electronic source document for this older edition, it might be possible to
> update that electronic document more cheaply than to digitize the entire new
> edition of the printed book.
>
> Note that there should be opportunities for cost-sharing among entities that
> might want to utilize a given electronic format for other purposes than
> braille production. If so, this has the potential to significantly reduce
> the contribution of the cost of digitization to the cost of braille
> production.
>
> Susan
>
>
>
>
>
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