Development of an Object-Oriented Graphic Description Language and a Graphic Production System Using The Language Available for Blind Users

Abstract

A blind physics teacher hopes to edit graphics independently, which are distributed to his students in his physics lecture. The physics teacher edits graphics using TikZ, which is a drawing package of LaTeX. However, it is extremely difficult for visually impaired people to think about editing process and accurately specify the positions of basic shapes such as lines and circles. In addition, since the figure is presented on the display, visually impaired people cannot check if the figure was produced correctly without an assistance of a sighted person. Therefore, we prototyped a novel object-oriented graphic description language that is easy to edit even for the visually impaired, and developed a graphic production system using the language. This paper describes the system we have developed.