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Essential Digest
Display readers, which convert digital textual content to audio, could make computer systems extra accessible to many disabled customers – together with those that are blind, low imaginative and prescient or dyslexic. But slideshow software program, equivalent to Microsoft PowerPoint and Google Slides, is not designed to make display reader output coherent. Such applications sometimes depend on Z-order – which follows the way in which objects are layered on a slide – when a display reader navigates by way of the contents. Because the Z-order does not adequately convey how a slide is specified by two-dimensional area, slideshow software program will be inaccessible to individuals with disabilities.
A group led by researchers on the College of Washington has created A11yBoard for Google Slides, a browser extension and telephone app that enables blind customers to navigate by way of advanced slide layouts and textual content. Combining a desktop laptop with a cellular system, A11yBoard lets customers work with audio, contact, gesture, speech recognition and search to grasp the place completely different objects are situated on a slide and transfer these objects round to create wealthy layouts. For example, a person can contact a textbox on the display, and the display reader will describe its shade and place. Then, utilizing a voice command, the person can shrink that textbox and left-align it with the slide’s title.
The group offered its analysis Oct. 25 at ASSETS 2023 in New York. A11yBoard is just not but accessible to the general public.
“For a very long time and even now, accessibility has typically been regarded as, ‘We’re doing a superb job if we allow blind of us to make use of fashionable merchandise.’ Completely, that is a precedence,” stated senior writer Jacob O. Wobbrock, a UW professor within the Data College. “However that’s solely half of our intention, as a result of that is solely letting blind of us use what others create. We need to empower individuals to create their very own content material, past a PowerPoint slide that is only a title and a textual content field.”
A11yBoard for Google Slides builds on a line of analysis in Wobbrock’s lab exploring how blind customers work together with “artboards” – digital canvases on which customers work with objects equivalent to textboxes, shapes, photographs and diagrams. Slideshow software program depends on a collection of those artboards. When lead writer Zhuohao (Jerry) Zhang, a UW doctoral scholar within the iSchool, joined Wobbrock’s lab, the 2 sought an answer to the accessibility flaws in creativity instruments, like slideshow software program. Drawing on earlier analysis from Wobbrock’s lab on the issues blind individuals have utilizing artboards, Wobbrock and Zhang offered a prototype of A11yBoard in April. They then labored to create an answer that is deployable by way of current software program, deciding on a Google Slides extension.
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For the present paper, the researchers labored with co-author Gene S-H Kim, an undergraduate at Stanford College, who’s blind, to enhance the interface. The group examined it with two different blind customers, having them recreate slides. The testers each famous that A11yBoard vastly improved their means to grasp visible content material and to create slides themselves with out fixed back-and-forth iterations with collaborators; they wanted to contain a sighted assistant solely on the finish of the method.
The testers additionally highlighted spots for enchancment: Remaining repeatedly conscious of objects’ positions whereas making an attempt to edit them nonetheless offered a problem, and customers had been pressured to do every motion individually, equivalent to aligning a number of visible teams from left to proper, as an alternative finishing these repeated actions in batches. Due to how Google Slides features, the app’s present model additionally doesn’t enable customers to undo or redo edits throughout completely different gadgets.
Finally, the researchers plan to launch the app to the general public. However first they plan to combine a big language mannequin, equivalent to GPT, into this system.
“That can probably assist blind individuals writer slides extra effectively, utilizing pure language instructions like, ‘Align these 5 bins utilizing their left edge,'” Zhang stated. “At the same time as an accessibility researcher, I am all the time amazed at how inaccessible these commonplace instruments will be. So with A11yBoard we have got down to change that.”
This analysis was funded partly by the College of Washington’s Middle for Analysis and Training on Accessible Know-how and Experiences (UW CREATE).
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