UML Modeling for Visually-Impaired Persons

Software modeling is generally a collaborative activity and typically involves graphical diagrams. The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is the de facto standard for modeling object-oriented software. It provides notations for modeling a system’s structural information (e.g. databases, sensors, controllers, etc.), and behavior, depicting the functionality of the software. Because UML relies heavily on graphical information, visually impaired persons (VIPs) frequently face challenges conceptualizing the often complex graphical layouts, involving numerous graphical objects. The overall objective of the PRISCA project is to facilitate collaborative modeling between VIPs and other project team members. Towards this end, this paper describes preliminary PRISCA work into developing software that automatically generates a haptic 3D representation of the UML diagrams from the output of an existing UML diagram editor. In addition, textual annotations for the models are converted to Braille and printed in 3D atop the respective graphical objects. Research and human factor challenges are reviewed in the paper in an effort to raise the level of awareness to the MDE community of this important area of work.