GraSSML: accessible smart schematic diagrams for all

Abstract

Graphical representation is a powerful way of conveying information. Its use has made life much easier for most sighted users, but people with disabilities or users who work in environments where visual representations are inappropriate, cannot access information contained in graphics, unless alternative descriptions are included. This paper describes an approach called Graphical Structure Semantic Markup Languages (GraSSML), which aims at defining high-level diagram description languages capturing the structure and the semantics of a diagram, and enabling the generation (by transformation) of accessible and “smart” presentations in different modalities such as speech, text, graphics, etc. The structure and the semantics of a diagram are made available at the creation stage. This offers new possibilities for allowing Web Graphics to become “smart”.