Accessible schematics content descriptors using image processing techniques for blind students learning

The documentation used when teaching Electronics in Engineering Degrees is not accessible to blind or visually disabled students because they can just have a text to speech conversion of the paragraphs but not a circuits schematics to speech conversion. This work presents an open source algorithm integrated in a tool compatible with Open Office. This algorithm applies digital image processing and computer vision techniques to any schematic circuits included in the document. It provides an intelligent and automatic textual description of both the sequence of electronic components and the position in the general schematics in order to make it accessible to blind people. Lecturers and teachers will be able to create teaching materials with common applications such as PSpice or Oregano, and then they will convert the charts into accessible-content figures in a very easy way. The screen reader will let them navigate around the graph in order to access the information of a concrete element in it. Assessment has been done with real trials and a satisfaction survey.