Designing graphs and charts visually by means of graphing applications such as OpenOffice or MS Excel is extremely efficient and cost-effective. However, one of the drawbacks of such approach is that ...graphs are sometimes involuntarily made less accessible by, for instance, using a text box as title. In this paper we evaluate a corpus of 120 ecologically-valid statistical graphs for accessibility problems, discuss possible algorithms to solve these problems and finally propose the OM (Object Model) Principle, which states that any digital object is made more accessible by simply using the application's model for that object: for instance, the TITLE field for the title text.
Numerical information is often presented in graphs to take advantage of the human ability to quickly find visual patterns. Unfortunately, this medium is problematic for people who are blind or ...otherwise visually-impaired. To provide accessibility to graphs published in The Daily (Statistics Canada's main dissemination venue), we have developed iGraph, a system that provides short verbal descriptions of the information depicted in graphs and a way of also interacting with graphical information.
This study examined employment, lifestyle, and quality of life of 70 graduates of the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired. Although two-thirds of the graduates were unemployed, high ...levels of satisfaction, independence, and community integration were reported. (Author/JDD)
The Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired provides outreach services for students with visual impairments throughout the state. Outreach services staff serve families and agencies by ...providing on-site consultation, workshop presentations, resource and referral, and technology loan services. (JDD)
Blind and visually impaired (BVI) face various problems during their navigation. Being unable to rely on sight greatly restricts their capacity to learn information about their surroundings. Scene ...recognition is crucial in improving life quality for BVI. Scene recognition systems can recognize and characterize the visual world using powerful artificial intelligence algorithms, allowing users to receive a critical overview. Indoor scene recognition systems are crucial for BVI to explore their environment. These systems are essential for increasing their independence, safety, and overall quality of life. Developing technology that allows BVI to perceive their environment and enable them to navigate and interact with the world on their own is extremely important. We propose in this paper a scene recognition system to assist BVI in their daily activities. The proposed work was developed on top of an efficient set of deep learning techniques called “Deep Evolutionary Algorithms (DEAs)”. DEAs are a type of algorithm that solves complicated search problems by combining the principles of evolutionary computing with deep learning. DEAs provide optimization techniques inspired by the process of natural selection. They iteratively develop a population of potential networks to identify optimum or near-optimal networks to solve complicated problems through genetic methods including mutation, crossover, and selection. To ensure the efficiency of the proposed work, extensive experiments have been conducted using two benchmark datasets the MIT 67 dataset and the Scene 15 dataset. New state-of-the-art results have been ensured by the proposed work in terms of recognition accuracy.
