The WGBH National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM) proposes to research and document effective practices for providing meaningful descriptions within Digital Talking Books (DTBs) that serve post-secondary students, professionals and scientists who have visual impairments or blindness. The project unites NCAM with the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB), Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic, Inc. (RFB&D) and the American Printing House for the Blind (APH) in a collaborative effort to develop research-based guidelines for effective descriptions of non-text science content. Project partners will explore and document current practices used within DTBs to describe science-focused images, charts, graphs, diagrams, illustrations, equations, and other graphics. The work will build on descriptive approaches developed for online science content that emerged from previous NSF- and U.S. Department of Education-funded projects. Scientists and professionals with visual impairments will contribute strategies, such as individual preferences that they ask assistants and readers to follow when describing images. Through a two-stage Delphi survey with 30 sighted and visually impaired respondents, these collected practices will be enhanced, refined and synthesized. Researchers will then use these practices to create representative descriptions for selected science images and evaluate their effectiveness with 60 visually impaired adults. Project deliverables include: A research report that presents a synthesis of effective practices as defined through this study and the results of evaluation of these practices with users with visual impairment and training materials for Digital Talking Book providers that summarize best practices and provide images and sample descriptions with opportunities for practice.
