[accessibleimage] ViewPlus SVG audio tactile technology

Hello listers.  Since Kaye has requested information on various systems, I 
guess it's time I piped up to describe the new SVG audio tactile technology 
under development by ViewPlus.  I have personally been working on audio 
tactile technologies since the early 90's.  There never has been any 
question in my mind that the tactile/audio access method developed by our 
friend Don Parkes provides outstanding accessibility to graphical 
information.  The big problem is exactly what Kaye worries about - that 
authoring the combination of the tactile and computer information is 
frightening to most people.

In 1996 I started a project whose object was to find a way to make 
mainstream graphics in some fashion that would be automatically 
accessible.  To shorten a long story, we adopted Scalable Vector Graphics 
while it was still under development as a web graphics language.  Nowadays 
SVG files can be exported by all major graphical authoring applications, 
and we've worked feverishly to develop a very user-friendly SVG editor that 
would make possible my dream of accessible mainstream graphics.  Once the 
SVG file is made, a blind user can open it in a ViewPlus application, hit 
the print button to make a tactile copy on some nearby ViewPlus embosser, 
pop the tactile copy on a touch reader, and well, just read it just as Don 
Parkes showed how to do in the 1980's.  The tactile copy can be made 
elsewhere of course and supplied to the blind user along with the SVG file, 
but that's not necessary if the user is on a network where she has access 
to the embosser.  Talk about easy!

These new tools have recently been put into early beta test, and we hope to 
introduce the technology commercially later this year.  Prototypes of the 
audio/tactile access have been shown at several trade shows and will be 
shown at more during the year.

There are a number of technologies that provide a good user experience for 
the blind user.  Our SVG audio/tactile experience has both advantages and 
disadvantages compared to the technologies that have been described on this 
list.  I believe that our SVG technology's great innovation is in the use 
of mainstream technologies for authoring and transmitting the 
information.  SVG is a mainstream graphics language.  ViewPlus will soon be 
making it possible for a mainstream author to create graphical information 
that can be extremely usable by everybody.  We are trying our best to make 
it so easy that even mainstream authors will do it.  Until that halcyon 
time comes, we're trying equally hard to make it easy for transcribers to 
create and re-create graphical information EASILY.  We'll begin 
beta-testing the authoring/editing technology in June with a workshop at 
the Texas School for the Blind and VI.  I promise you that we'll continue 
development until making graphical information is easy and non-threatening 
for anybody who knows enough about computers to make something graphical or 
who can scan in an image on paper.

John
PS I'm climbing on an airplane tomorrow and will check e-mail only 
occasionally for a couple of weeks.  If anybody has questions, I'm happy to 
answer, but please be patient.
John

John A. Gardner
Professor and Director, Science Access Project
Department of Physics
Oregon State University
Corvallis, OR 97331
tel: (541) 737 3278
FAX: (541) 737 1683
        SAP URL: http://dots.physics.orst.edu/

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