SCOPE Services to the visually impaired

SCOPE approached a number of individuals and projects involved in adapting texts for visually impaired users to see if there was a consensus on the type of files required and if it would be possible to draw up a draft licence with the visually impaired in mind. At the moment, solutions are very dependent on the level of funds, resource and equipment available in individual institutions, whilst specific research seems to be producing an array of possibilities. For an on-demand service, each solution will have implications for copyright clearance, production processes and delivery.

At the University of Stirling, Paul Amery the Special Needs Advisor recommended plain ASCII text as the most suitable format for material, as it can be handled by whatever system the particular institution has in place. Permission is sought from rightsholders using a letter drafted by the SCOPE Copyright Officer. Much has been achieved in collaboration with publishers (some are providing books on disk where possible), and valuable development work is in progress in tandem with commercial developers:

'I've been working on text formats for our VI computer users for some time. Kurzweil Educational Systems, have recently produced the Kurzweil 1000 with an inbuilt, grade 1 & 2 Braille translator allowing for scanned documents to be Brailled. In addition to this the OCR software developed by Kurzweil has outstanding accuracy compared with other OCR software and allows for scanned 'texts' to be saved into many different formats, in our case .rtf & .doc. This allows our students to scan and immediately read back, or save as rtf or doc allowing the JAWS screen-reader to read the text from MS Word. The 1000 software is able to auto-rotate and has column reading facilities. We are also in discussion with Kurzweil and the Computer Science department about developing a parse that translates, tables, embedded objects, and mathematical formulae into straightforward texts.'

Contact was also made with Professor Peter Brophy of the REVIEL project at Manchester Metropolitan University. He suggested that PDF (and any other visually rich presentation) was not in theory a good standard for the visually impaired, due to unsatisfactory handling of tables, diagrams and illustrations. However he cautioned that 'the document format scene and software suitable for visually-impaired people to use is changing all the time!' Further information on the REVIEL project may be found at: http://www.mmu.ac.uk/h-ss/cerlim/jprojects/reviel.htm

Professor David Brailsford of Nottingham University has very recently given details of work in progress by Adobe Acrobat to develop an accessibility plug-in:

'Acrobat Access presents an alternative view of the open document in a separate window. This view contains the text in as close to reading order as possible, including presenting multi-column documents as a single column and "straightening" all non-horizontal text.'

More information is available in the 'white paper' by Liz McQuarrie: PDF and Adobe(R) Acrobat(R) viewers for the visually disabled at: http://www.adobe.com/prodindex/acrobat/accesswhitepaper.html

Much work is being done on PDF-HTML conversion, with the Adobe website offering a proxy service, by which a visually impaired user can submit a PDF document and get it back as HTML. The long-term aim is to develop 'behind the scenes structural markers' to aid not only the visually impaired but also other software to interprete documents. In this way it should be possible for MS Word (for example) to import a PDF file with sufficient accuracy to require only final editing and polishing before delivery.
See the Adobe website: http://www.adobe.com/supportservice/devrelations/pgmlqa.html

Other work is being undertaken by the SEDODEL (Secure Document Delivery for Blind and Partially Sighted People) project: see http://www.arttic.com/projects/sedodel

Microsoft has a number of initiatives and an Accessibility Home Page: http://microsoft.com/enable/

SCOPE staff have not been able to undertake a full investigation of this, but hope that this document will provide useful contacts for those interested. We note that the Copyright Licensing Agency is investigating the feasibility of offering a new licence to aid copyright clearance appropriate to the needs of the visually impaired.

July 1998