Development of a Drawing Assistant System for Blind Users Using an Object-Oriented Graphic Description Language

With the development of information processing systems such as screen readers, the accessibility of various information to visually impaired people has been dramatically improved in recent years. In addition, InftyReader, an OCR system for mathematical expression recognition, is making it easier to access scientific documents with mathematical expressions. However, there are still large barriers for blind people to access visual information such as graphs and diagrams. In particular, it is almost impossible for blind people to generate precise figures without the assistance of sighted people. Therefore, we are developing a graphic description language available for the blind. In conventional graphic description languages, it was necessary to accurately specify the coordinates of parameters when drawing elementary shapes. By introducing an object-oriented idea, our language enables users not to specify many coordinates. We have produced an experimental drawing assistant system using our language. In this paper, we outline our language and system, and show the results of experiments which were conducted to verify the effectiveness of our system.