Implementation of Electronic Braille Document for Improved Web Accessibility

Abstract

Visually impaired people tend to use printed text when their residual vision is high and braille when their residual vision is low. Braille is a medium that enables visually impaired people to see the world through texts, and they use braille to understand and express a variety of information required in daily life. Owing to developments in technology in recent years, visually impaired people can capture images of documents or objects using a camera mounted on their eyewear or using a smartphone camera and, after extracting texts and converting them into speech, they can interpret the information by listening to the audio content. As a result of substantial research and effort over a long period of time, significant technological progress has been made in enabling visually impaired people to access information. In addition to the development of technology, there are examples where the improvement in information accessibility for visually impaired people is due to improvements in policies and institutions. A typical example is accessibility to the Web, for which the most important means of information access is voice. However, to understand written texts, the most-frequently used learning method involves repeated reading. Hence, for more accurate understanding of the information, the means of “reading” is important, and for visually impaired people, “reading” refers to braille reading. In this study, first, the problems associated with the access to electronic documents that are provided by an information system through the Web or email are examined from the perspective of information access of visually impaired people. Second, a technique is implemented to convert data of a electronic document into braille in the information system server for enabling visually impaired people to access documents more accurately. Third, this study proposes a design method that can translate tabular information of civic service documents to braille by supplementing the disadvantages of conventional braille translation programs. Fourth, an institutional method is proposed for improvement in the efficiency of the aforementioned technique. It is hoped that the results of this study can be used to expand the electronic braille document infrastructure, which will enable visually impaired people to access a variety of information with increased accuracy. Based on this, we intend to provide a foundation for social participation.