Facilitating Information Accessibility for the Print Disabled

Information accessibility is becoming a key to personal, professional and national development in this increasingly connected world. While cost of access is still an issue in developing countries such as Sri Lanka, global trends indicate that this barrier will be removed sooner rather than later. Another significant impediment, the Language barrier, is currently being addressed in the region through various Localization initiatives. In this paper however, we focus on a particularly disadvantaged community which is to a large extent shut out from the enormous global information resource made conveniently accessible to the rest of us through the Internet and the World Wide Web: this is the Print Disabled community. With a global percentage of 0.57% and a Sri Lankan estimate of 0.36%, this community forms a significant minority, who are in many other ways well equipped to benefit most from information technology. While the language literacy rate of this community is usually very high in countries like Sri Lanka, their access to information is greatly hampered owing to their relatively low IT literacy. One of the key reasons for this is the mismatch between their physical faculties and the most prevalent user interface in the computer – its screen. Work undertaken at the Language Technology Research Lab (LTRL) at the University of Colombo School of Computing (UCSC) has focused on some of the key assistive technologies for enabling the active participation of this community in the emerging knowledge society. Several of these, such as the development of non-proprietary fonts and input methods, have a broader relevance in facilitating local language support for all. Others, such as Text to Speech, Optical Character Recognition and Talking Book technology, are more specifically supportive of the print disabled community. Still others, such as web accessibility support, are fast becoming global best practice to assist various differently-abled communities. This paper will describe each of the key technologies relating to web content accessibility in local languages with a focus on the Sinhala language support tools currently available through the LTRL. It will also outline preliminary results and findings of testing and deploying such technology in general.