Access to non-textual information includes not only reading information but writing and manipulating that information. Students do not learn math just by reading. They learn by doing. For blind people, reading is difficult, but writing and manipulating math and scientific information is extraordinarily cumbersome today.
The Science Access Project recognized these difficulties and has written the TRIANGLE computer program that permits blind people to read, write, and do math and science.Objectif is a Windows program that simplifies editing bit-mapped graphics, prints out to a braille graphics printer, and permits users to make an electronic label file for viewing with TRIANGLE. Boxer is a program for making trees and flow charts that can be printed on a standard braille text printer. Both were designed as tools for sighted people making tactile graphic materials. Objectif intrinsically requires sight for its use, but Boxer can be used by a blind person.
The SAP has recently begun an ambitious new project intended eventually to assure that all electronic informational graphics is accessible. The philosophy is that pictures should be constructed from the information by a viewer. The popular new VRML viewer used in many world wide web applications is an example of this kind of display method. We have recently demonstrated fully accessible graphics such as the periodic table of the chemical elements using a standard VRML browser that speaks object labels when "clicked" either on-screen or on a tactile copy sitting on an external touch pad.
The SAP philosophy implies that authors should use intelligent authoring tools and display graphics in electronic documents with accessible viewers. There are a number of reasons aside from accessibility by people with print disabilities for adopting this new philosophy. The SAP intends to show why "accessibility" of graphics is important to everybody and will encourage companies marketing graphic authoring tools to include view options in the future.
Screen is a full-screen window manager that multiplexes a physical terminal between several processes, typically interactive shells. Each process is given its own tty session, and the braille additions we have recently added to Screen allow the user to view these directly with the display without having to log in through a DOS machine. The newest version of screen (3.8.6), which contains the braille accessibility program with three braille representation tables is available at the SAP ftp site.