Tactile Graphics Project

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Workshop on Accelerated Production of Tactile Graphics Join us at our workshop at the Spring Professional Development Conference of the National Braille Association in Colorado Springs Friday April 27, 2007! This workshop will be in two sessions, morning and afternoon. In the morning session, participants will be introduced to the Tactile Graphics Assistant and its accompanying workflow shown below. This new technology enables the rapid translation of figures in math and science textbooks from a visual form to a tactile form. The web page http://tactilegraphics.cs.washington.edu describes the overall Tactile Graphics Project at the University of Washington. The afternoon session will be a hands-on session where participants will translate sets of figures from textbooks to a tactile form using the new technology. There are a limited number of stations that will be available for hands-on training, but others are invited to attend to observe the process. Those participating the afternoon training must attend the morning session. In addition to the Tactile Graphics Assistant, the software that will be used in the afternoon training will include Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, Omnipage Optical Character Recognition, and Duxbury Braille Translator. We expect that those who participate in the afternoon hands-on training will have experience with these or similar software applications. Please download the TGA and Workflow Manuals below for more detailed information. If you are interested in participating in the afternoon hands-on training please send e-mail to Richard Ladner at ladner@cs.washington.edu before April 1, 2007. The sooner the better because of limited space for training. For more information on the National Braille Association Conference, visit http://nationalbraille.org. Agenda Morning Session Overview Lecture Break Demonstration of the TGA and workflow process shown below. Afternoon Hands-on Training Session Obtain Images (Scanned or Digital) Manually Classify Images into Groups That Will be Translated as Batches Preprocess Images Using Adobe Photoshop Extract Text Using UW's Tactile Graphics Assistant (TGA) Process Images Without Text to Make Them Accessible Using Adobe Photoshop Use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) System to Recognize Extracted Text Translate Recognized Text to Braille Using Duxbury Braille Translator (DBT) Resize Original Images Using Adobe Photoshop Automatically Insert Braille Back Into the Original Image Using Adobe Illustrator Make Manual Corrections Download the Training Manual Tactile Graphics Assistant & Workflow Manual Workflow

	Computer Science & Engineering University of Washington Box 352350 Seattle, WA  98195-2350 (206) 543-1695 voice, (206) 543-2969 FAX [comments to ladner]