Re: Is it time for AI with Accessibility?

Thanks Charles,
Right around 2000 is when I abandoned pattern recognition as a means to
rationalize visual pages. At that time, owing to a drop in AI funding, and
some hardware limits really signaled a dead end. However, in the last 10
years graphics hardware has improved dramatically, and we have a lot of
very regular data... a lot, like a web's worth.

When we approached this in the 90's to about 2000 we were dealing with
digitized pages from articles and books. Just finding the angle of the
lines on a page was a process. There was  a lot of noise to filter.

With electronic-based literature we have a completely different state of
input. Skewed lines are usually decorative, a category of their own. There
is a matching between screen regions and runtime code elements.

I see three approaches at least. Analysis based on generated code, image
analysis of displayed text and hybrid analysis based on our knowledge of
the content. This could lead to a couple of accommodations that would
exceed the impact of anything we have today.

1) Very smart screen magnification. This could apply to professional
documents in PDF or another printer oriented language. This would make
Journal articles accessible.
2) Very smart analysis of content based on the image. That is rendering a
markup equivalent that could be read and personalized given the user's
needs configuration.
3) Hybrid analysis resulting in the  output of 2) or 3).

In the 90s we got bogged down with Post Office examples where the goal was
to extract and process address and zip code information from very messy
input.

It just seems like it may be time to look at this again. We do have
dramatically better tools in 2020.

Thanks all for your feedback,
Wayne


On Tue, Dec 8, 2020 at 2:11 AM Charles 'chaals' (McCathie) Nevile <
chaals@yandex.ru> wrote:

> On Tue, 08 Dec 2020 07:20:48 +1100, Wayne Dick <wayneedick@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > I am interested in any research in this direction. Anybody know about
> > anything like this in progress?
>
> Hello Wayne, all.
>
> I went to a presentation in New Zealand in the early 2000s, at the
> invitation of Graham Oliver, on a project that had been running for quite
> some years (if I recall correctly, since the early 90s) to do this.
>
> I no longer recall enough to easily find it (and I have looked for it
> before without success).
>
> The basic idea was to use machine learning systems to look at the
> interface of a user's computer, and provide a personalised approach to
> understanding the components. Initially the system used a very expensive
> high-powered computer to read the interface of a standard desktop PC, but
> as increasing power became available, it was slowly morphing toward
> software running directly on the machine.
>
> I also recall that a large part of the explanation about automatic visual
> recognition used jet fighter planes as the example object to follow.
>
> In my mind the project may have been associated with Stanford University,
> and it may have been called Eureka, although that is widely used as a
> name, so not a very helpful search term :(
>
> If this rings a bell with anyone I would love to find more pointers to
> the
> work.
>
> Cheers
>
> Chaals
>
> --
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>
>