Abstract
Mathematical learning from digital libraries and the web is a challenging problem for people with visual impairments and blindness. In this paper, we focus on developing the mathematical learning skills of braille users with a new assistive technology developed to retrieve semantically mathematical information from the web. This kind of research is still in the study phase. This paper presents an overview of assistive technologies for braille users followed by a description of the proposed system, which works in four phases. In the first phase, we translate a query math formula in braille into MathML code, and then we extract the structural and semantic meaning from the MathML expressions using multilevel presentation. In the classification phase, we choose a multilevel similarity measure based on K-Nearest Neighbors to evaluate the relevance between expressions. Finally, the query result is converted to braille math expressions. Experiments based on our database show that the new system provides more efficient results in responding to user queries.
Highlights
Assistive technologies help people with visual impairments to improve their lives
We review the state-of-the-art process in three stages: we started by performing a keyword search from 2000 to 2017 for phrases like “braille code”; “mathematical expressions retrieval”; “MathML”; “Assistive Technologies”, and many related words
Like sighted people, we have proposed our assistive technology for people with blindness to help them study, access, and retrieve mathematical expressions from the web and/or digital libraries
Summary
People with visual impairments use speech synthesizers to access the displayed information on the computer screen or braille display (e.g., MAVIS, LaBraDoor, LAMBDA) to write electronic documents, send emails, and take notes, or hearing by screen readers (e.g., Safari+ VoiceOver, Chrome, MathPlayer, MathTalk, JAWS). These assistive technologies have some limitations to access all kinds of information like images, tables, graphs, and mathematical notations [1,2]. Having access to the content of digital mathematical documents (Word, PDF, and web pages) should be in braille or by voice to be used by people with sight disabilities in their studies and communications
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