Blind Information System (BIS)

Authors: Zdenek Mikovec, Martin Klima, Dusan Pavlica

Contents

• General information

  • Motivation
  • Goal of this project
  • Our approach
  • History and participants in the project

• Detail information

  • Workshops and seminars
    • Workshop Dresden, December 1998
    • INTERACT 99 - Submission (NOT ACCEPTED)
    • User Interface Analyzis
  • User manuals
    • Description creation module
    • Description browser module

Home Page Zdenek Mikovec

General information

Motivation

Development of Information Technologies (IT) at the end of 20th century brought two main changes for blind people. The first, positive one, can be described as extensive electronic communication (mainly Internet - e-mail and WEB), which gave blind people the ability to work and communicate with other people at nearly the same level as non-blind people. The second, negative change (for blinds), can be found in more intensive use of graphical representation of information - graphical user interface (GUI) with pictures and visual effects. The problem of graphical information is based on its very difficult presentation for blinds caused by complicated structure of graphical information. The use of GUI is very complicated for blinds because the communication in standard computer environment is based on the use of pointing devices (e.g. mouse), which is totally unacceptable for blind.

The orientation in GUI without a visual feedback is absolutely confusing. The original motivation of our work was to enable to blind to use IT more extensively by suppressing negative aspects and supporting positive changes in IT development described above.

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Goal of this project

At the beginning the main goal of our project was to help visually impaired people in perception of graphically represented information, but later we realize that the problem with perception of graphical information is based not only at the user side but can be found at the side of a system too (e.g. hand held computers with reduced screen, mobile telephones).

The goal of our project is to solve the problem of perception of graphical information without GUI.
In fact it meant that we had to develop

• tools that would allow us to describe any information, that was normally described by pictures, in such a way that it would be understandable without GUI
• tools that would allow users effectively process such a picture description without GUI and get required information.

Our project goal was not to create a solution of a complex analysis of a picture structure and semantic or universal methodology for a complex picture description. Our goal was neither to create system for an automatic picture description nor to analyze how blind people understand pictures (human vision, memory trace, etc.).

Our approach

Our approach to picture perception process (see Fig. 1) is focused on following application areas:

• processing of pictures that represent complicated situations, functionality, structure, etc. (e.g. Fig. 4-1 Ruby laser)
• processing of pictures that represent navigation area (e.g. Fig. 5-1 Flat scheme)

These pictures can be characterized by structure, objects and relations among them.

Fig. 1: Picture perception process

To handle these application areas the picture description method must keep complexity and specific structure of graphical information and might not loose any important information and must allow later efficient browsing in the description.

Description creation and later browsing in such a very complex information like a picture description could be complicated and time consuming. It is clear that only easy and quick solution can be widely used and this is why we decide to develop software tools for creation and browsing in the description. Next problem we had to solve was keeping consistency of documents with additional picture description (for unified user access - blind and non-blind; for administrators of these documents - e.g. Web masters). The suggested solution was to integrate the description directly into the picture file and to eliminate necessity of additional pages with description.

The conceptual model of such a system - BIS (see Fig. 2) consists of three modules:

• Basic module - Creating/browsing in description file & Grammar of description
• Description creator module
• Description browser module.

Creating/browsing in description file & Grammar of description module

In this module we give a definition of the picture description creating/browsing methodology and the picture description grammar. The grammar as a formal definition of the picture description structure is used to automate creation of next two modules of the system (Description creator and browser) and to make the picture description understandable and usable for other systems that can operate with formal grammar definitions. This is implemented as a basic software module that consists of functions for manipulating with description file (loading, saving, searching, etc.), creation and browsing in the description. The next two modules of the system use this basic module.

This module of the system will be designed and implemented in this Master thesis.

Description creator module

Software tool for creating the picture description. This tool is not designed for automatic description creation - it will only help the human user to speed up the creation of picture description. The human user assistance during the creation process is necessary.

This tool uses the services of the basic module of the BIS system. Development of this tool is described in Bachelor thesis of Dusan Pavlica.

Description browser module

Software tool for browsing in the picture description in the form suitable for blinds. This tool must offer all the functionality needed for efficient browsing in the description and for obtaining required information.

This tool uses the services of the basic module of the BIS system. Development of this tool is described in Bachelor and Master thesis of Martin Klima.

Fig. 2: Blind Information System (BIS) - Conceptual scheme

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History and participants i this project

All of these activities were supervised by Prof. Ing. Pavel Slavik, CSc.

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Pictures

Fig. 4-1: Ruby laser

Fig.5-1: Flat scheme