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Contribution Details

Type Conference or Workshop Paper
Scope Discipline-based scholarship
Published in Proceedings Yes
Title Accessible PDFs: Applying Artificial Intelligence for Automated Remediation of STEM PDFs
Organization Unit
Authors
  • Felix Maximilian Schmitt-Koopmann
  • Elaine May Huang
  • Alireza Darvishy
Presentation Type paper
Item Subtype Original Work
Refereed Yes
Status Published in final form
Language
  • English
Event Title The 24th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility
Event Type conference
Event Location Athen, Greece
Event Start Date October 23 - 2022
Event End Date October 26 - 2022
Series Name ASSETS '22
Place of Publication New York, NY, USA
Publisher Association for Computing Machinery
Abstract Text People with visual impairments use assistive technology, e.g., screen readers, to navigate and read PDFs. However, such screen readers need extra information about the logical structure of the PDF, such as the reading order, header levels, and mathematical formulas, described in readable form to navigate the document in a meaningful way. This logical structure can be added to a PDF with tags. Creating tags for a PDF is time-consuming, and requires awareness and expert knowledge. Hence, most PDFs are left untagged, and as a result, they are poorly readable or unreadable for people who rely on screen readers. STEM documents are particularly problematic with their complex document structure and complicated mathematical formulae. These inaccessible PDFs present a major barrier for people with visual impairments wishing to pursue studies or careers in STEM fields, who cannot easily read studies and publications from their field. The goal of this Ph.D. is to apply artificial intelligence for document analysis to reasonably automate the remediation process of PDFs and present a solution for large mathematical formulae accessibility in PDFs. With these new methods, the Ph.D. research aims to lower barriers to creating accessible scientific PDFs, by reducing the time, effort, and expertise necessary to do so, ultimately facilitating greater access to scientific documents for people with visual impairments.
Free access at DOI
Digital Object Identifier 10.1145/3517428.3550407
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