Developing methodologies for the presentation of graphical educational material in a non-visual form for use by people with vision impairment

Students with vision impairment have enormous challenges and difficulties accessing graphical educational materials. The predominant usage of graphical information in e-Learning environments makes them inaccessible for blind or vision-impaired students. This paper describes university research project on accessibility improvement in graphical presentation of educational information. Packet Tracer the network simulator used in Cisco Networking Academy is used as an experimental environment. Also an accessible model for Packet Tracer using combination of assistive technologies is presented.

I. Introduction

According to the World Health Organization report, 285 million people are vision impaired worldwide. 39 million are blind and 246 million have low vision. A Vision Australia employment report shows that there is more than 60% unemployment amongst blind and low vision population [1]. Educating vision-impaired society is a key factor to help them find jobs, and this can be achieved only by using accessible version of learning material [2].