Better access to on-line information graphics is a pressing need for people who are blind or have severe vision impairment. We present a new model for accessible presentation of on-line information graphics and demonstrate its use for presenting floor plans. While floor plans are increasingly provided on-line, people who are blind are at best provided with only a high-level textual description. This makes it difficult for them to understand the spatial arrangement of the objects on the floor plan. Our new approach provides users with significantly better access to such plans. The users can automatically generate an accessible version of a floor plan from an on-line floor plan image quickly and independently by using a web service. This generates a simplified graphic showing the rooms, walls, doors and windows in the original floor plan as well as a textual overview. The accessible floor plan is presented on an iPad using audio feedback. As the users touch graphic elements on the screen, the element they are touching is described by speech and non-speech audio in order to help them navigate the graphic.

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Forensic facial reconstruction is still at its infancy inSri Lanka and is yet to utilize the advanced technologies of other countries. Hence introducing a more efficient multimedia based technique to the local forensic officials in order to improve the efficiency and the accuracy of the reconstructions is the aim of this study. In contrast to the other mechanisms used for facial reconstruction by others, this paper adopts a novel approach of muscle based facial reconstruction which goes hand in hand with the manual reconstruction process. The adopted process involved, acquiring a 3D model of the skull and digitally sculpting muscles in a 3D environment, followed by adding different facial features to improve identification. The research also encompassed a tissue thickness analysis that is conducted for the first time on Sri Lankans as well as a facial component analysis, both of which were needed to improve the accuracy of the final output. This procedure was attempted on cases of the age category 20-30 and of medium weight. The outputs and the process were evaluated with different parties such as general public, forensic officials, lawyers and CID all of which are to be benefited from this application.The ultimate goal of conducting the study was to understand and overcome the challenges faced in developing this novel application for the Sri Lankan Forensic officials and to establish the first unit for facial reconstruction in Sri Lanka.

We present a generic model for providing blind and severely vision-impaired readers with access to online information graphics. The model supports fully and semi-automatic transcription and allows the reader a choice of presentation mediums. We evaluate the model through a case study: online house floor plans. To do so, we conducted a formative user study with severely vision impaired users to determine what information they would like from an online floor plan and how to present the floor plan as a text-only description, tactile graphic, and on a touchscreen with audio feedback. We then built an automatic transcription tool using specialized graphics recognition algorithms. Finally, we measured the quality of system recognition as well as conducted a second user study to evaluate the usefulness of the accessible graphics produced by the tool for each of the three formats. The results generally support the design of the generic model and the usefulness of the tool we have produced. However, they also reveal the inability of current graphics recognition algorithms to handle unforeseen graphical conventions. This highlights the need for automatic transcription systems to return a level of confidence in the recognized components and to present this to the end-user so they can have an appropriate level of trust.