New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia - Vol. 10 - No. 2 - December 2004 - Automated interpretation and accessible presentation of technical diagrams for blind people

Oct 26, 2026

The EU-supported TeDUB (Technical Drawings Understanding for the Blind) project develops a software system to make technical diagrams accessible to blind and visually impaired people. It provides two modules: analysis of diagrams semi-automatically or automatically, and interactive presentation of results. The system handles both bitmap diagrams requiring interpretation and semantically enriched diagram formats. Users can navigate and annotate diagrams using multiple input/output devices, and extensive evaluations show an overall positive response and effectiveness.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryTechnology

FormatPDF

Pages23

Reading Time58 min

AccessFree to download

Introduction

TeDUB project overview

Diagram input types and analysis

User interface and interaction

Use cases for technical diagrams

Semantic foundations and knowledge domains

New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia, Vol. 10, No. 2, December 2004, 141 􀀄/ 163 Automated interpretation and accessible presentation of technical diagrams for blind people M. HORSTMANN *$ , M. LORENZ$ , A. WATKOWSKI$ , G. IOANNIDIS$, O. HERZOG$, A. KING%, D. G. EVANS%, C. HAGEN§ , C. SCHLIEDER§ , A.-M. BURN’, N. KING’, H. PETRIE’, S. DIJKSTRA I and D. CROMBIE I $Technologie-Zentrum Informatik, University of Bremen, Bremen Germany % School of Informatics, University of Manchester, Manchester UK § Laboratory for Semantic Information Technology, Bamberg University, Bamberg Germany’Centre for Human Computer Interaction Design, City University, London UKIFNB, Amsterdam, The Netherlands The EU-supported TeDUB (Technical Drawings Understanding for the Blind) project is developing a software system that aims to make technical diagrams accessible to blind and visually impaired people. It consists of two separate modules: one that analyses drawings either semi-automatically or automatically, and one that presents the results of this analysis to blind people and allows them to interact with it. The system is capable of analysing and presenting diagrams from a number of formally defined domains. A diagram enters the system as one of two types: first, diagrams contained in bitmap images, which do not explicitly contain the semantic structure of their content and thus have to be interpreted by the system, and second, diagrams obtained in a semantically enriched format that already yields this structure. The TeDUB system provides blind users with an interface to navigate and annotate these diagrams using a number of input and output devices. Extensive user evaluations have been carried out and an overall positive response from the participants has shown the effectiveness of the approach. 1. Introduction A number of mature techniques, such as screen readers with text-to-speech synthesis and/or Braille displays, allow blind people to access text documents. Optical character recognition (OCR) software offers this access even if the *Corresponding [author. Email: mir@tzi.de](author. Email: mir@tzi.de) New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia ISSN 1361-4568 (print)/ISSN 1740-7842 (online) \# 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd [http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals](http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals) [DOI: 10.1080/13614560512331326017](DOI: 10.1080/13614560512331326017) 142 M. Horstmann et al. documents originate from printed material. However, a considerable amount of information available today is contained in documents that do not consist solely of accessible, linear text. One such type of document is the technical diagram. These are documents that use visual content to convey information, such as the use of graphical symbols instead of text, layout and position to communicate segregation and aggregation, and lines and patterns to identify components and relationships. This visual content makes it difficult to present these diagrams to people who cannot see them. Examples of technical diagrams include electronic circuit diagrams, software engineering diagrams and architectural floor plans. Many other documents have these features: what differentiates technical diagrams is their common visual vocabulary and grammar. Each is created according to a set of accepted rules or an explicit standard for the particular knowledge domain of the diagram, such as electronics, and all diagrams within that domain must comply with this accepted practice or be unintelligible to anyone except the author. These rules therefore specify how the visual content should be interpreted, describing the meaning of symbols and images and the role of spatial information. This means that the visual content is explicitly defined and therefore amenable to identification, exhaustive analysis and re-presentation to blind users by some non-visual method in a way that less well-defined document types ([e.g. business](e.g. business) diagrams) are not. Technical diag

FAQs

What is the TeDUB system designed to do for blind users?

TeDUB makes technical diagrams accessible by analyzing them and presenting the results through an interface that supports navigation and interaction for blind and visually impaired users.

How does TeDUB handle different kinds of diagram inputs?

It can process bitmap images that lack explicit semantic structure and also semantically enriched formats that already contain the diagram’s structural information.

What do the user evaluations indicate about TeDUB?

Extensive user evaluations produced an overall positive response, demonstrating the effectiveness of the approach.

Oct 26, 2026

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