[Blindmath] Reintroducing myself and beta test opportunity for new STEM accessibility service.

Wed Feb 8 12:21:39 UTC 2017

Hi Aquil,

Excellent, it is always great to hear from other theoretical physicists coping with similar challenges in terms of vision. I’d be happy to exchange experiences. I am happy to Skype or exchange e-mails, but perhaps best if we do this using my Sussex e-mail account, as I am only using this gmail address for mailing list purposes.

I’ll drop you an e-mail from my private address.

Yes, Infty OCR is a great piece of software, though being a perfectionist I get rather upset when it doesn’t perform the OCR to perfect quality, such that it is reliable. This is my negative virtue, and I am unfair on this point as I perfectly know how difficult it is to create any software, let alone OCR engines. 

Yes, please do sign up for IRIS as a beta tester, me and the team are keen on getting more feedback and brainstorm with other Blind STEM students and professionals before reaching the final form. 

One thing I can say is that once there is a sighted, science community behind the scenes, the range of applications can open up. We start with uploading diagrams, but there are future directions we want to pursue. One of them is similar to your idea. Some feedback suggested us that because some figures have equations on them e.g. labels of curves, it would be good that the volunteers have a MathML editor so they can return equations as part of the image description instead of trying to replicate some LaTeX syntax. So I don’t see a reason why we couldn’t extend this idea of uploading image files of equations and return a MathML version which is fully accessible. However, how you get that single equation on the image is an other story.

An other application of IRIS we are working on is to do with web accessibility. However, reasonably I don’t think a good enough solution will be ready for September when we aim to release IRIS 1.0 in the public. It is more realistic that other applications will follow in IRIS 2.0 in the coming years.

Looking forward to hearing from you with your sign up request to contact at grapheel.com <mailto:contact at grapheel.com>.

Best wishes,
Daniel 

> On 7 Feb 2017, at 22:44, Aqil Sajjad via Blindmath <blindmath at nfbnet.org> wrote:
> 
> Hi Daniel:
> 
> I just read your e-mails on the blind math list. I am myself a blind phd in theoretical physics, and am therefore very much interested in your idea on making diagrams accessible.
> 
> I will soon be signing up as a beta tester, but it would also be interesting to touch base and share some notes on how to do physics as a blind person some time. One thing I have often felt the need for is clarification of some formulae. Say I am reading some physics material, which was originally in an inaccessible format. I run infty reader to OCR it and get a LaTeX version. The accuracy of OCR is reasonably good, but from time to time I encounter an equation which has not been recognized correctly, and I can tell that something is not right.
> In such a situation, it would be nice to be able to ask a sighted person just to read the equation out to me or give me a correct version in a format like LaTex. Such a clarification of 1 or 2 equations will typically not take than a diagram, and I was therefore thinking that it could easily be added to the service you are working on offering.
> 
> Aqil
> 
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Dániel Hajas via Blindmath" <blindmath at nfbnet.org>
> To: <blindmath at nfbnet.org>
> Cc: "Dániel Hajas" <d.hajas.lists at gmail.com>
> Sent: Monday, February 06, 2017 9:04 AM
> Subject: [Blindmath] Reintroducing myself and beta test opportunity for new STEM accessibility service.
> 
> 
>> Dear All,
>> 
>> Let me reintroduce myself, as probably the memory of my person faded on this list, since I have to confess, I haven’t been posting or regularly reading the conversation going on between the BlindMath list members, even though I am signed up for a number of years and always found the knowledge exchange of the list very valuable, supportive and a friendly place. Personal and work related pressure prevented me from participating in this community in the past year, year and a half, which I wish to change now and catch up with all the unread e-mails, contribute with anything I can to new topics. As part of my reintroduction, please also allow me to bring your attention to a new STEM accessibility service. You can read more about it as well, and if you wish to participate and help shaping the service  with your feedback and insights, please let the developer team or myself know about it.
>> 
>> Now to the point:
>> 
>> I am Daniel Hajas, a blind theoretical physicist at the University of Sussex, England; and founder of Grapheel, (www.grapheel.com) which is a initiative to enhance accessibility of science education for people with special needs, using a set of online services, hardware products and public engagement activities, partnering with other organisations to make scientific content more accessible.
>> 
>> As part of the Grapheel initiative, me and a small team are designing an online, science community based image description service (called IRIS) to enhance the study experience of blind and visually impaired students in their education. Initially we would like to focus on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) education, but later expand to subjects at arts and humanities and support image descriptions of financial graphs, or wave form visualisations in music editing.
>> 
>> As we are at a very early stage of development, we would highly appreciate insights and feedback from the blind community familiar with accessibility considerations and state-of-the-art products and services. In particular, I would be grateful if  members of  this community could test and advise us on how to improve the service (please read more about it below). We have a feature incomplete test version, which we run in closed beta but before adding newer and new features we believe could be useful, we wish to start engaging with experienced, early adapter users, such that we can essentially build IRIS together from ground up.
>> 
>> The service is very similar to initiatives such as, Be my eyes, Bespecular, TapTapSee and other; however, our service aims to focus specifically on educational needs, with a pool of volunteering experts at given academic disciplines.
>> 
>> How does IRIS work?
>> • blind or visually impaired (BVI) students upload an image of scientific content, graphs, diagrams.
>> • BVI students select a field of study (tag) e.g. physics, maths, chemistry etc. and a level of difficulty.
>> • BVI students can ask a specific question they would like to know about the figure.
>> • A pool of sighted volunteers with the necessary knowledge are assigned to groups of chosen disciplines based on their user settings of competency.
>> • When an image request is sent by a BVI student, the figure appears in a queue that all volunteers of a specific discipline can view and describe.
>> • If a request is accepted, the volunteer should give a description of the image based on provided guidelines.
>> • The recipient of the description can either accept the response, or ask for further clarification.
>> 
>> What will I need to do as a tester?
>> All you need to do is to log in whenever you can, upload a figure of scientific content, wait for the description and let us know what are the things you like, don’t like and suggest us new features you believe would be useful or could be done in a better way.
>> 
>> If you feel you would be happy and able to help us, please let us know by getting in touch on contact at grapheel.com. Then we will send you a URL to access the service, your username, password and a “How to get started” instruction.
>> 
>> Best wishes,
>> Daniel
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> 
> 
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