Speech and Braille Tools to Improve Access to University Scientific Courses

Visually impaired students meet problems in attending scientific university courses. The main barriers concern reading scientific resources, which are usually available in formats not accessible through Braille devices and speech synthesizers, processing mathematical expressions through assistive tools and understanding and manipulating graphical representations. This paper illustrates the aims of the @Science thematic network which was founded to share best solutions about science accessibility and some of the emerging tools to process mathematical formulae experimented by @Science members.