For students who are blind or have other visual disabilities, keeping up with reading assignments is no small challenge. Fewer than 5 percent of published books, including textbooks, are available in text-to-speech, Braille, or large-print versions. Even if students can locate an accessible edition, they’re likely to come across graphics, formulas, and photos labeled only as “image.” That’s not so helpful when it comes to understanding Newton’s laws or analyzing trends on a graph.
To overcome this challenge, Benetech, a technology nonprofit based in Palo Alto, Calif., has developed an open source web application that draws on the wisdom of crowds to translate images into words. The new app, called Poet, is the latest in Benetech’s pioneering efforts to use technology for social benefit.
Benetech is also the creator of Bookshare, the world’s largest library of legally accessible digital books. It currently has more than 150,000 titles available for download in multiple languages.
A decade ago, before e-readers became ubiquitous, Bookshare started using scanners to digitize and share content. Volunteers around the world still scan and upload texts. Bookshare contracts with social enterprises in the developing world to proofread scanned content as part of its quality control process.
The e-book revolution has made even more books available in digital format. Bookshare now gets about 70 percent of its books directly from publishers electronically, bypassing the need for scanning and proofing. But that hasn’t solved all the challenges of accessibility. “Just because books are electronic doesn’t mean they are accessible,” says Betsy Beaumon, vice president and general manager of literacy programs at Benetech. “You can’t fully learn a topic without access to graphics and images.”
The next goal, she says, “is to change the face of accessible images and graphics in educational materials,” which are becoming increasingly visual. Existing solutions like tactile graphics are expensive to produce and don’t work well for every type of image. As a work-around, Beaumon says, “Schools might assign someone to sit next to an individual learner and describe pictures. That’s not a scalable solution.”
The US Department of Education’s Office of Special Education recognizes the growing need for accessible educational materials. Federal support gives qualified disabled US students free subscriptions to the Bookshare library, which otherwise costs users $50 annually. Federal funding also enabled Benetech to develop the Digital Image and Graphic Resources for Accessible Materials (diagram) Center in 2010. Poet, one of the first new tools to emerge from diagram, launched in May 2012.
Poet brings a human solution to a technical challenge. Image description isn’t easy to automate. “It’s not just a matter of describing an image,” Beaumon explains. For educational materials, you also need to understand “What is the student supposed to learn?”
The open source tool means that anyone can use Poet to add image descriptions to electronic books. For students with disabilities, this should mean faster access to books. Sallie Spencer, a middle school teacher from Michigan, said students with disabilities welcome the chance “to read books that their peers are reading.” With Poet, they’ll be able to discuss images as well as text.
Poet speeds up the process of making graphics accessible by providing a simple text box that volunteers use to add descriptions electronically. Volunteers simply log in, select a text, view images, and add descriptions. After Benetech follows up with quality control to make sure descriptions are of consistently high quality, the book goes back into the Bookshare library. Crowdsourcing should make descriptions even better as volunteers improve on each other’s descriptions. This summer, for instance, 19 Google volunteers teamed up on image descriptions. In four hours, they wrote more than 1,200 descriptions for graphics in four textbooks.
Volunteers contributing to Poet currently number “in the hundreds,” Beaumon said. Recruiting efforts are under way to expand the pool with volunteers who have subject-area expertise. High school and college students in advanced courses might consider contributing to Poet to earn service-learning credits. Retired physicians happen to make “very good image describers,” Beaumon adds, especially for science texts.
Read more stories by Suzie Boss.