Improving the accessibility of ASCII graphics for the blind students: Producing my own graphics

Abstract

Graphics are pervasively used in natural sciences. Making graphics accessible to blind people is difficult because blind students have to know how the layout looks like, to understand what the layout means and to have a possibility to create a graphic by themselves. Therefore we suggest to use ASCII graphics. Our approach tries to improve the accessibility of ASCII graphics by automatically extracting and transforming them in order to be printed with a tactile embosser. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.