The UNIVERSITY of NORTH CAROLINA at CHAPEL HILL One-Thousand Words Peter Parente Enabling Technology Spring 2003 Enriching Digital Images to Improve Information Accessibility

The UNIVERSITY of NORTH CAROLINA at CHAPEL HILL A Different View Typical ♦ Assistive technology is a means for people with disabilities to function in society. Novel ♦ Assistive technology helps society accept all people.

The UNIVERSITY of NORTH CAROLINA at CHAPEL HILL Applied to Communication Do not build special tools for people with disabilities. Do not re-author data for people with disabilities. Instead, build tools that allow people to communicate with one another more effectively.

The UNIVERSITY of NORTH CAROLINA at CHAPEL HILL Visual Communication How do we easily and effectively share information that is traditionally visual (diagrams, photographs, movies, etc.) with people who have difficulty viewing and understanding the information?

The UNIVERSITY of NORTH CAROLINA at CHAPEL HILL Related Work Convert image regions into sound directly in a web browser (Roth, et al. 1998) Convert digital images to tactile form using image processing (Hernandez, Barner 2000)

The UNIVERSITY of NORTH CAROLINA at CHAPEL HILL Related Work Annotate webpages on the fly with text (Huang 2000) (Takagi, Asakawa 2000) Classify images using XML markup (Mikovec, et al. 2000)

The UNIVERSITY of NORTH CAROLINA at CHAPEL HILL A Common Theme All of these projects focus on augmenting digital images using some automated process. Are we too lazy to make improvements by hand? Is it too difficult? What if it were easier? Would people do it?

The UNIVERSITY of NORTH CAROLINA at CHAPEL HILL Assistive Augmentation Take existing software and data Put new data and features on top The result: familiar software with better accessibility, more features, and more information.

The UNIVERSITY of NORTH CAROLINA at CHAPEL HILL Applied to Images Enriched Images ♦ Standard digital image ♦ Visual annotation ♦ Text annotation ♦ Speech annotation ♦ Tactile annotation

The UNIVERSITY of NORTH CAROLINA at CHAPEL HILL One-Thousand Words If a picture is worth a thousand words, then put those words back into the picture. Build a tool that allows people to create enriched images and share them with others.

The UNIVERSITY of NORTH CAROLINA at CHAPEL HILL Prototype Take standard digital images and add sound, speech, touch, and text markup. Allow people to explore the images with the new markup right in their web browser.

The UNIVERSITY of NORTH CAROLINA at CHAPEL HILL Prototype Three parts ♦ Editor: Like Microsoft Paint, but with speech and sound ♦ Server: A computer on the Internet that shares the overlays ♦ Viewer: Puts the overlays right on top of images in Internet Explorer

The UNIVERSITY of NORTH CAROLINA at CHAPEL HILL Demo

The UNIVERSITY of NORTH CAROLINA at CHAPEL HILL Future Ideas Make markup available directly on images in a web browser Make markup available directly on top of other programs Make better markup tools Automate some of the process