Benetech's next goal is to enable AI to read charts for the visually impaired

Think back to the time a few decades ago. For those who are younger, think back to the time a few years ago and think about the importance of learning how to interpret charts for basic education when you first entered high school.

Imagine again the experience of young learners with visual impairments receiving important education in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) subjects without even knowing what a diagram is, let alone The data conveyed by the chart.

When discussing complex, data-rich, and highly visual models, possible assistive technologies that visually impaired students typically use in the classroom (such as screen readers and Electronic Braille display) is somewhat inadequate.

The only option in this situation is often for the teacher or vision instructor to verbally describe the data in detail, but this practice is unsustainable and detrimental to the independence of visually impaired students.

Benetech has spent the past few months working with Schmidt Futures to address this fundamental issue of global education inequality. Benetech is a non-profit social enterprise whose internationally renowned Bookshare platform focuses on converting books into accessible formats for use by people with print disabilities.

Schmidt Futures is a charity founded by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his wife Wendy. Schmidt Futures is dedicated to unleashing the power of the Internet and advanced technologies and solving unmet needs in science and society.

The joint initiative builds on ongoing work between Benetech and General Motors to use artificial intelligence to identify, extract and analyze the more than 8 million mathematical equations in Bookshare. Convert to an accessible format.

Next Level

The latest project from the two institutions involves a whole new level of complexity. The new project focuses on building a large data set mainly for training artificial intelligence to recognize graphics and graphics in textbooks. Graph and accurately describe these graphs and charts to learners with visual impairments or dyslexia.

The project faced huge challenges due to the thousands of potential variables involved. The project also involved holding a number of data science competitions, with the goal of building artificial intelligence models to automatically classify and repair graphs and charts. best practices.

Brad Turner, Vice President and General Manager of Global Education and Literacy at Benetech, explained, “Twenty years ago, text accessibility was a major challenge, when optical character recognition was just beginning to be used, which could scan pages and It is converted into readable text for screen reading software."

He said, "Today, the new field is STEM, mathematics, charts, graphics and physics. We can now convert mathematical equations The accuracy rate has improved to around 99%, and we are excited to launch our project with Schmidt Futures to do some exploration of using data sets to describe charts and graphs."

Equality in Education

As As Turner said, the challenge is one with global implications.

He said, “Currently in large areas of Africa, South Asia and Latin America in the Southern Hemisphere, visually impaired students aged 10 or 11 years and above are not allowed to study STEM subjects at all because students with visual impairments do not have access to education in these subjects. Content."

It's not that students aren't interested or smart," Turner said. "The content in these subjects doesn't exist in a format that's suitable for students with visual impairments."

Despite this, there is a lack of access to STEM education opportunities are not purely a Third World problem.

Data from the "Women, Minorities, and Disabilities in Science and Engineering" report released in April 2021 by the National Science Foundation's National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics shows that in the United States, there is one or The overall proportion of scientists with multiple visible or invisible disabilities has grown at a disappointing rate, from 6% in 1999 to 9% in 2019.

It was also found that the unemployment rate of scientists and engineers with disabilities was higher than that of scientists and engineers without disabilities. The unemployment rate of scientists and engineers with disabilities in 2019 was also higher than the overall unemployment rate in the United States.

Kumar Garg, Vice President of Partnerships at Schmidt Futures, said, “Our society often mistakenly believes that STEM is a very professional thing, something that only a very small number of students are interested in, but STEM is actually increasingly becoming a In core skill areas, every student should have broad familiarity and competency in STEM."

He explained, "There seem to be so many different ways, and students are guided not to go down these learning paths. Education is cumulative. If a student falls behind in the process of establishing core basic concepts, it will be very difficult for them to catch up in the future."

He said, "If we learn from different people, Without accounting for these opportunity gaps at key points in our trajectory, a huge equity challenge has been created. These fast-growing areas are areas of interest for students, and we should do everything we can to actively encourage and support them."

According to Turner, the losers are not just individual students.

He said, “The harm we do to students with visual impairments or dyslexia who could grow up to be the next Galileo, Albert Einstein or Louis Pasteur is immeasurable. scientists), but are unable to enter the science field because the educational content cannot be provided for them. And our wider society cannot use their skills and talents."

He also said, "Young people may be Reading in different ways, whether with eyes, ears or fingers, it would be unfair to deprive them of their true mission in life just because of this."

Thinking about this line of thought, it is difficult for us Not to reflect on the talent that may have been lost, but perhaps it’s those unfair educational experiences we have now that really highlight the need to work toward a brighter tomorrow.

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