Sort by Date

Since 1991, the University of Linz has been supporting people with special needs in university education. Support is provided in a triple manner: at school
- to find a decision for a university course -, during university studies, and afterwards, to enter the labour market.
We describe our far-reaching set of support services, and we report about our experience with it.

Infty tools include InftyReader, and optical character recognition software for mathematical formulae, and ChattyInfty, a multimodal editor to write and read mathematics through Braille and speech devices. This talk introduces these tools by discussing examples. Further information can be found at the Science Access Net Website

This hands-on presentation by Sauro Cesaretti, a blind student of Computer Science at the Università di Urbino (Italy), shows how to cope with some accessibility issues that arise while using these computation programs.

The talk will discuss features of OpenOffice.org and the OpenDocument Format that are related to mathematical notation: from editing and reading mathematics
in OpenOffice.org to the output formats (Portable Document Format, MathML, XHTML). The accessibility features of each of these aspects will determine if
and how OpenOffice.org, which has a much smaller market size than Microsoft Office, can play a role in access to mathematics for students and researchers
with a visual impairment.

Two years ago the Support centre for visually impaired students at Comenius University in Bratislava started with localization of Lambda editor. After successful
adaptation some few blind secondary school students were equipped with the software.
The first part of presentation informs about our experience with this system, about the localization process of Lambda.
In the second part offers the basic information about Lambda courses for secondary schoole students and teachers, about experiences collected during these

Prof. John Gardner introduces ViewPlus Technologies tools to access scientific papers. Collaboration between ViewPlus Technologies and the American Physics Society in making physics papers accessible to blind and partially sighted readers is discussed.

This is the presentation of a new and really interesting project that has just started at the New Mexico State University.
The project is aimed at developing a new generation of tools and solutions to enhance accessibility of mathematics for students with different degrees of visual acuity.
The backbone of the project is the use of techniques drawn from knowledge-based systems, and integrate them to create novel, and hopefully more effective solutions.

This talk illustrate the features of the ReadMath software. It is developed by EuroBraille. This software enables blind and partially sighted students to read and write mathematics on portable devices.

Within the EC funded project MICOLE, several ideas for a multi-modal and collaborative software solution to support blind people in accessing, but also
in actually doing mathematics were formulated. We shall outline these ideas and demonstrate two prototypes that have been developed within the project.

This talk introduces a new prototype of a two-dimensional piezo-electric tactile display. Examples from geometry are discussed.