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Analyzing visual layout for a non-visual presentation-document interface

Published: 23 October 2006 Publication History

Abstract

Presentation documents play important roles in many fields, such as business and education. The principal purpose of presentation documents is to convey information visually, so recognizing the visual layout is essential for understanding those documents. However it is inherently difficult for the blind people to recognize a visual layout, because there are numerous types of charts in presentation documents. As the first step to solve such problems, this study focuses on diagrams in which objects or groups of objects are bound by arrows. Such diagrams usually show relationships among the objects. If such relationships could be recognized by screen readers, it would make them accessible. However, the presentation authoring applications do not have functions for embedding these relationships among objects. Therefore this paper proposes a visual analysis method for diagram structure in presentation documents to automatically create metadata. It generates metadata which describes the relationships of objects, and the source-destination relationships of arrows. Then a novel interface utilizing the metadata was prototyped to present the visual structure of presentation documents in a tree view. This allows blind users to understand presentation documents easily, because it represents the visual structure that current screen readers cannot expose. In addition, they are familiar with the tree view interface, so they can use it without training. Finally, an evaluation shows that our method for automatically creating the metadata can be applied to various types of diagrams in presentation documents.

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cover image ACM Conferences
Assets '06: Proceedings of the 8th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility
October 2006
316 pages
ISBN:1595932909
DOI:10.1145/1168987
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 23 October 2006

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Author Tags

  1. alternative interface
  2. diagram
  3. metadata
  4. visual analysis

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Overall Acceptance Rate 436 of 1,556 submissions, 28%

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Cited By

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  • (2024)Enhancing Productivity Applications for People who are Blind using AI AssistantsExtended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613905.3638180(1-6)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • (2024)Accessible learning objects: a systematic literature reviewUniversal Access in the Information Society10.1007/s10209-023-01025-723:4(1931-1945)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2024
  • (2023)Accessible Document Layout: An Interface for 2D Tactile DisplaysProceedings of the 16th International Conference on PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments10.1145/3594806.3594811(265-271)Online publication date: 5-Jul-2023
  • (2023)Slide Gestalt: Automatic Structure Extraction in Slide Decks for Non-Visual AccessProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3580921(1-14)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
  • (2022)Diffscriber: Describing Visual Design Changes to Support Mixed-Ability Collaborative Presentation AuthoringProceedings of the 35th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology10.1145/3526113.3545637(1-13)Online publication date: 29-Oct-2022
  • (2021)Slidecho: Flexible Non-Visual Exploration of Presentation VideosProceedings of the 23rd International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility10.1145/3441852.3471234(1-12)Online publication date: 17-Oct-2021
  • (2021)A computer aided drawing system evaluation with early and late blind usersAssistive Technology10.1080/10400435.2020.182974534:4(392-401)Online publication date: 19-Mar-2021
  • (2020)An empirical evaluation of a graphics creation technique for blind and visually impaired individualsBritish Journal of Visual Impairment10.1177/026461962091142239:3(191-213)Online publication date: 20-Apr-2020
  • (2016)Drawing for Blind Learners: Assistive Technology for Graphical Design2016 IEEE 16th International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT)10.1109/ICALT.2016.47(436-440)Online publication date: Jul-2016
  • (2013)Crowdsourcing platform for workplace accessibilityProceedings of the 10th International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility10.1145/2461121.2461135(1-4)Online publication date: 13-May-2013
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