Perspectives and Possibilities for the Automated Processing of Scientific Texts for Blind and Visually Impaired People

In this presentation I would like to point out the possibilities which could be open to us in using XML for producing electronic texts for this target group. In XML you can describe how a document’s formatting should be presented. This means that a document which is written in XML could be transferred in an optimised form for reading with a braille display, in an optimised form for visually impaired or in a form which is suitable to be read by a computer’s voice output. I want to show the most important qualities of XML. A greater part of this presentation will be a generalisation of the problem. The disadvantages of the systems used traditionally shall be compared with the advantages of XML.