OASIS System for Organizing, Annotating, and Serving Information to Students without Sight

OASIS (Organizing, Annotating, and Serving Information to Students without Sight) is a novel assistive and rehabilitative system to help students who are blind in accessing digital libraries, with the goal of helping them solve complex problems, using multiple books and other digital information sources simultaneously. Currently, users who are blind can access digital information only with the help of screen reader programs (such as JAWS for Windows). Even though these screen reader software render a given digital text accessible through audio or Braille, it is generally very difficult and time consuming for a user who is blind to search and effectively use relevant content in a digital collection. The problem is compounded when a user needs to drive from multiple books, for example when a student is studying on a particular topic using a digital library environment. OASIS brings the relevant digital content closer to users who are blind and visually impaired, and makes it accessible with minimal interactions, by segmenting, organizing, annotating, and cross-linking digital books to render them easily accessible and navigable by learners without sight. INTRODUCTION As part of the iCare project at Arizona State University, in partnership with the Rehabilitation Services Administration and Foundation for Blind Children, we are developing the OASIS (Organizing, Annotating, and Serving Information to Students without Sight) digital library system for students who are blind and visually impaired. The ultimate goal of OASIS is to enable these students to effectively use relevant content from multiple books, notes, and web sources when studying on a particular topic. To achieve this goal, OASIS segments, organizes, annotates, and cross-links digital books to render them easily accessible and navigable by learners without sight Users who are blind cannot simply locate, point, and click on electronic documents; they have to listen searching for the link in the document using only the keyboard and a screen reader program. (Hoz and Asnat, 2001) highlighted that students who are blind use four learning techniques to deal with mostly-linear textual information: summarizing in writing, summarizing mentally or orally, identifying and recognizing ideas, and elaborating on the text with imagespictures from memory. On the coarsest level, sighted users are able to perceive these graphical elements, such as icons, and their relationships without identifying the detailed functionality that