Tedub: Providing Access to Technical Drawings for Print Impaired People

Digitized technical drawings are available for use at work, for education, and at home. They can be presented and edited on standard PCs with appropriate software installed. One of the most difficult problems of being blind is accessing and using such information. Access and use of graphic information for blind people is problematic. A solution is to produce a textual description of the graphic. However, this solution denies blind people an extremely important component of access to graphics – the ability to explore them from different perspectives, answer one’s own questions and build up one’s own mental model of the material represented. For these purposes one needs an interactive system. Keynotes: image processing, technical drawings, visual impairment, user interfaces