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AUTHOR: MAIL.AXSLIBL5
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Greetings,
I'm happy to announce a new service at UCLA that makes online information
more accessible to people with print impairment, and a gopher server that
demonstrates how it works: InfoUCLA in ICADD format.
UCLA's campus wide information system (CWIS) is called InfoUCLA. Like
other universities' CWIS's, InfoUCLA contains many documents of interest to
the campus community, from the schedule of classes to the bookstore
inventory to the campus directory. This in itself is a great thing for
everyone on campus, but an especially wonderful thing for people who have
never seen such information in any form due to disability. As online
information available in text, or ASCII, format, this information is
accessible to people with print impairment through adaptive computing
technologies.
But the world of online information is moving beyond ASCII. ASCII cannot
convey much important information about the structure and content of
documents using presentation conventions, like italics, boldfacing, tables,
and other important document features that print readers take for granted.
SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language, ISO 8879) is an international
document standard that enables you to capture and preserve the important
structure and context of the information and allow for easy down
translations into many applications (your favorite word processor, for
example, or Gopher or World Wide Web) on many platforms (the Mac, PC, Unix
worstation, mainframe).
Sighted computer users will have access to this increasingly rich world of
online text. Will print impaired users? Information in InfoUCLA is now
being converted into SGML. This will enable campus wide information to be
directly translated into many applications and platforms. One of these is
the ICADD (International Committee on Accessible Document Design, ISO
12083) document standard, an implementation of SGML, designed to enable
print-impaired readers to have equal access to the same document features
as their non-disabled peers. An electronic document that has been
formatted with the ICADD standard can be converted into braille, large
print or voice output by an application designed to accept ICADD files.
At UCLA we have recently converted our first InfoUCLA data set into ICADD:
GRAPES, the Graduate and Postdoctoral Exramural Support data base. When
anyone at UCLA looks up GRAPES on InfoUCLA, they can now view it either as
a text document or as an ICADD document. This is the model for the
conversion of all future information on InfoUCLA.
We have set up a gopher demonstration of this document conversion process
so you can follow the whole procedure. You will find it on the
Disabilities and Computing Program Gopher Server on InfoUCLA. From your
gopher client, select UCLA, go to Other UCLA Gopher Servers, select the
Disabilities and Computing Program Gopher Server, then chose the folder
"InfoUCLA Access for People with Print Impairments." There you will find a
document "About InfoUCLA Access for People with Print Impairments." This
file will guide you through the demonstration.
In the demo you will first see a sample GRAPES document as raw data, then
follow it as it is converted into SGML, then ICADD, then into Grade II
Braille (via Mega Dots, a braille translation program designed to accept
ICADD files). You can print this Grade II file on your brailler to
experience an ICADD formatted braille document first hand. A simulated
braille file is also available for sighted users (from Mega Dots). An
ASCII version of the sample Grapes document (from ICADD) is available for
large print and voice output, as there is as yet no large print or screen
reading program that accepts ICADD.
You will also find a folder that repeats this whole procedure using a
portion of the campus directory. Look at the raw data. See what a mess it
is! You'll see why it is so hard to even get online data as "simple
ASCII." Then look at it after it has gone through the document conversion
process and you'll understand why SGML and ICADD are a superior method to
represent etext for people with print impairment.
InfoUCLA is joint effort of the UCLA Microcomputer Support Office (MSO, a
part of the Office of Academic Computing) and the UCLA Library. The MSO's
Disabilities and Computing Program (DCP) is a part of the InfoUCLA planning
effort and the InfoUCLA - ICADD project is the result of this
collaboration. Participants in the InfoUCLA - ICADD project include Jeff
Suttor, Daniel Hilton-Chalfen, Guido Grimaldi, Patrick Burke, Betsy Coles,
and Grant Young. Thanks too to David Holliday of Raised Dot Computing for
his support with Mega Dots.
For more information on the project contact:
Jeff Suttor, UCLA library, JSuttor@Library.UCLA.Edu, 310-825-1206
Daniel Hilton-Chalfen, UCLA Disabilities and Computing Program
hilton-chalfen@mic.ucla.edu, 310-206-7133, TDD: 310-206-5155
Sincerely yours,
Danny
Daniel Hilton-Chalfen, Ph.D.
Coordinator, UCLA Disabilities and Computing Program
hilton-chalfen@mic.ucla.edu
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Dec 02 2012 - 01:30:03 PST