RFB Symposium on Math and Science Access

Recordings For the Blind (RFB) organized a two-day symposium (May 12--13, 1994) on providing persons with print impairments improved access to mathematical and scientific documents.

Here is the initial call for participation describing the goals of this symposium. AsTeR (Audio System for Technical Readings) enables automatic production of audio documents. This can result in tremendous savings in both time and effort in providing alternative access to technical documents, and thereby increase the availability of such documents in an accessible form. The interactive nature of AsTeR also enables the user to interact far more effectively with such documents. The conference focused on how AsTeR could be moved from being a research system to one that could:

Produce books on tape.
Provide an interactive reading machine system for students. To achieve this, AsTeR needs to be ported to other computing platforms.
Produce educational material in Braille.

Here are the official proceedings from the conference. Here is a short trip-report describing the outcome of the conference. An executive summary of the conference, as well as my comments are also available.

raman@cs.cornell.edu

Last modified: Wed Jun 1 15:27:30 1994