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

Sun Jul 17 04:49:08 UTC 2011

Birkir,

You may have seen some things I have not seen, but I have yet to see a blind person fail because he only knew how 
to access materials using sighted readers.  It isn't that it couldn't happen, but most people who go through college now 
get some exposure and knowledge of other techniques.  However, I have seen people struggle in the computer field 
because they went through college without ever using readers, having had all their materials either transcribed by a 
DSS office or by using electronic texts.  Such people were lucky in a way, but when they discovered that there 
generally is not a disabled employees office on many job sites, they simply didn't know what to do.  The point here is 
not to glorify readers, nor is it to say that readers should be considered as a general means of accessing materials.  I 
think you were probably also saying that some institutions may see readers as the cheap way out as well, and you 
could be right about that.  However, readers probably can be oversold to institutions, but I believe students need to 
understand that they can use readers, even on the job, to fill in the accessibility gaps, at least for a while yet.

You have some interesting things going there.  I hope that your presentation goes well.

Best regards,

Steve Jacobson
.  
On Sat, 16 Jul 2011 22:29:01 +0000, Birkir R. Gunnarsson wrote:

>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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