[Blindmath] Reading technical e-books with tables, charts, diagrams, etc

[John Gardner]

Ben, in principle, tables, math, and graphics can be accessible in e-books. Some publishers are beginning to make e-books accessible (well at least the math and tables), but it is likely to be many years before most, especially STEM books are accessible. 

So I have a question. It is possible today to put a decent table browser in an e-book reader. It is also possible to make software that would recognize math equations pretty accurately and would make many graphics accessible. But the full system would be expensive, costing a couple thousand dollars up front and a software subscription of a few hundred dollars a year. I doubt that many blind people could afford that. I am pretty good at making costs small for blind end users, but I cannot do magic. Any thoughts from this list about some way to sponsor this for blind people? The reality of life is that there are just not many blind people doing technical work, so without sponsorship, a company that made such a system could not expect to sell much and would not be in business very long.

John


-----Original Message-----
From: Blindmath [mailto:blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Ben Humphreys via Blindmath
Sent: Tuesday, December 29, 2015 6:52 AM
To: blindmath at nfbnet.org
Cc: Ben Humphreys <brhbrhbrh at gmail.com>
Subject: [Blindmath] Reading technical e-books with tables, charts, diagrams, etc

Good morning listers,

I'm curious to know what you all do when you're happily plodding through an electronic book and you get to an inaccessible table, formula, graph, code sample, figure etc?

For the books I read, this happens about every 10 minutes.

So far, my strategy has been to buy books in Kindle format, remove the DRM, and extract the HTML and graphics.  Then read the text in browser.

The text in the browser typically indicates the graphic it refers to, so I'll go find the graphic and run it through Abbey OCR, with generally good results.

But this has several disadvantages:
* Momentum reading the text is lost while fighting graphics
* Text tables must still be read into Excel so one can navigate easily with spoken row and column headings
* OCR works nicely for tables, code samples but not for charts or diagrams
* OCR accuracy ranges from 0% to 97% but even if it's very close, a single 1 that turns into an i is problematic without human review

For charts and diagrams, I can envision someone skilled in Photoshop removing noisy backgrounds, enhancing important lines, and labeling important points in Braille font, then embossing.

I guess in a K-12 setting, a Teacher of Visually Impaired person would birddog students books and do these kind of things.

But once out of high school, where does one find such a person?

Thanks,

Ben


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