Document Navigability: A Need for Print-Impaired

TL;DR

This paper addresses the challenge of navigating internal references in printed scientific documents for print-disabled individuals by proposing a vision-based technique to locate and extract metadata of referenced content, improving accessibility.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel vision-based method to identify and extract metadata of internal references in printed documents, aiding print-disabled users' navigation.

Findings

Effective on both digital and scanned documents

Works well for citations in scientific papers

Improves navigation for print-disabled users

Abstract

Printed documents continue to be a challenge for blind, low-vision, and other print-disabled (BLV) individuals. In this paper, we focus on the specific problem of (in-)accessibility of internal references to citations, footnotes, figures, tables and equations. While sighted users can flip to the referenced content and flip back in seconds, linear audio narration that BLV individuals rely on makes following these references extremely hard. We propose a vision based technique to locate the referenced content and extract metadata needed to (in subsequent work) inline a content summary into the audio narration. We apply our technique to citations in scientific documents and find it works well both on born-digital as well as scanned documents.