Although the Braille system has served for a hundred and fifty years as a quick and effective way to make written materials widely available to the blind community, there is currently no efficient method in existence for converting images found in math, science, and engineering textbooks to a tactile format that can be utilized by blind students and professionals. Diagrams, graphs, and charts must be converted by hand through one of many painstaking and time-consuming methods. As a result, blind students and professionals lack access to valuable visual resources. The Tactile Graphics Project was created to assess the problems surrounding this issue and develop a viable solution. I have been involved with the Tactile Graphics Project for the past two years. My role with the Project centers on building a software component to efficiently handle text label placement in graphs, charts, and diagrams. When labels are converted from English to Braille, the text often becomes longer and interferes with graphical elements and other text labels in the image. In addition, some text labels are placed at an angle in the image, and must be rotated to the horizontal in order to be properly displayed as Braille. My software component corrects these problems by automatically creating an optimal layout for the text labels in a given image.
Advised by Richard Ladner
CSE 403
Wednesday
May 2, 2007
4:30 - 5:20 pm