Development of a New Graphic Description Language for Line Drawings -- Assuming the Use of the Visually Impaired

Abstract

In recent years, the development of information technology has made it easier for visually impaired people to access language information by developing electronic books and OCR applications. However, graphics are still inaccessible to the visually impaired. Therefore, it is very difficult for the visually impaired to create graphics without help of sighted people. Conventional graphic description languages such as TikZ and SVG and so on are difficult for the visually impaired to write codes because they require numerical coordinates precisely when drawing basic shapes; hence calculating such numerical coordinates is quite difficult for blind users. To solve this problem, we are developing a graphic description language and a drawing assistance system that enables visually impaired people to create figures independently. Our language is based on an object-oriented design in order to reduce the difficulties on the visually impaired. In this paper, we describe our language and show the result of an experiment for evaluating the effectiveness of our language.