[Blindmath] Accessible visual objects by a screen reader

[Michael Whapples]

One alternative I quite like for drawing is the PGF/TikZ package for 
LaTeX. I don't know all the formats it can produce, but should it be 
required then you certainly can compile it to PDF and I have been lead 
to believe one can insert a PDF into a word document.

There is a introduction to PGF/TikZ on the LaTeX wikibook at 
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/PGF/TikZ, and should LaTeX be new to 
you then you might want to learn a little about LaTeX, the LaTeX 
wikibook might be a starting point although there are other 
tutorials/books on LaTeX.

Also remember the LaTeX wikibook only scratches the surface of what can 
be done with LaTeX and PGF/TikZ, I think the PGF/TikZ official reference 
book is over 200 pages.

Regarding the descriptions of charts, yes there is not anything to do 
precisely what you ask. However one thing which can be used should you 
have a set of X-Y data, if you were to get excel to export the data as a 
text file with multiple columns (columns separated by tabs and rows on 
new lines), then you could use other tools to get some sort of 
accessible output (eg. MathTrax will attempt to provide a textual 
description of the X-Y plot as well as an audio graph). Remember though, 
such solutions are very specific to certain types of charts and so are 
far from being a general solution.

Michael Whapples
On 15/12/2012 11:24, Kiran S Deshpande wrote:
> Dear Pranav,
>
> Agreed that at the moment there is not a feature in the screen reader to
> describe the graphic object, you have suggested me that the program SVG draw
> 1 can be used, i downloaded the same and used it to draw some shapes, saved
> the file as sample1. Svg, now if i wanted to impot this file in a word
> document or an excel sheet, it is not possible either. So is this the
> limitation of the diagrams being drawn by some program that can be imported
> in to word or excel directly.
>
> Regards,
>
> Kiran
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Blindmath [mailto:blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Raju
> singh
> Sent: 15 December 2012 15:46
> To: Blind Math list for those interested in mathematics
> Subject: Re: [Blindmath] Accessible visual objects by a screen reader
>
> Oh hi pranav sir, thanks a tonne for sharing such a valuable site!
> -----Original message-----
> From: Pranav Lal
> Sent:  15/12/2012, 3:37  pm
> To: 'Blind Math list for those interested in mathematics'
> Subject: Re: [Blindmath] Accessible visual objects by a screen reader
>
>
> Hi Kiran,
>
> No screen reader can do what you ask. Screen Readers like Jaws and Window
> Eyes access the document object models of programs like Excel and display
> values relating to graphs. They don't do image analysis. Yes, we have OCR in
> some of them but that does not handle math as far as I know.
>
> As for directly drawing shapes, the best we have is scalable vector
> graphics. See http://www.dickbaldwin.com.
> Pranav
>
>
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