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

[Victorious]

A possible alternative is not to go the commercial route but try to
crowd-fund the resources required to develop this software; similarly to
what was done for NVDA remote? I think this is an issue that many people can
relate to, and may be willing to contribute.

-Vic
-----Original Message-----
From: Blindmath [mailto:blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of John
Gardner via Blindmath
Sent: Wednesday, December 30, 2015 2:50 AM
To: Blind Math list for those interested in mathematics
<blindmath at nfbnet.org>
Cc: John Gardner <john.gardner at viewplus.com>
Subject: Re: [Blindmath] Reading technical e-books with tables, charts,
diagrams, etc
Importance: High

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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