Toshihiro Kanahori: "Infty System – an integrated suite specialised for scientific documents including mathematical expressions"

Toshihiro Kanahori, Tsukuba University of Technology, Japan

E-mail: kanahori [at] k.tsukuba-tech.ac.jp

We have been developing an integrated suite, named "Infty", specialised for scientific documents including mathematical expressions. Infty mainly consists of a document reader “InftyReader” and authoring tools "InftyEditor" for sighted persons and "ChattyInfty" for the visually disabled. InftyReader recognises scientific documents including mathematical expressions and outputs the results as files in various accessible formats such as MathML,
LATEX and so on. They can be directly imported into InftyEditor or ChattyInfty and can be edited with them. Using ChattyInfty, even if they do not know technical Braille notation, Visually disabled people not only can read mathematical documents written by Infty but also can write mathematical documents in those various formats with its reading output. Both of InftyEditor and ChattyInfty provide seamless environment for input between ordinary text parts and mathematical expressions. In addition, edited results can be converted to Japanese Braille codes. At this moment, Braille codes that Infty can output is only Japanese. We intend to develop a combining interface between Infty and UMCL (Universal Maths Conversion Library) with the cooperation of Dr. D. Archambault and other UMCL experts, so that Infty can output various Braille notations to which UMCL can convert.www.inftyproject.org