Improving Accessibility to Governmental Forms1

Although many governmental institutions have provided their costumers with access to electronic government documents there is still a lack of accessibility for handicapped citizens. In this paper we present an approach to improve access to governmental forms for handicapped citizens, in particular for people with visual impairments, elderly people, illiterates or immigrants. We describe a system where we combine scanned images of paper-based forms containing textual information and a text-to-speech synthesis to an audio-visual document representation. We exploit standard document formats based on XML and web service technology to ensure independence from software and hardware