Around the world 2.2 billion individuals have a type of imaginative and prescient incapacity in accordance with WHO. As disabilities have an effect on individuals of all ages, it’s important that training is accessible to all and ensures equitable entry to kids and adults alike. However, the fact is there are at present limitations in training for individuals who are blind or have low imaginative and prescient, together with the shortage of accessible textbooks and classroom supplies. This is what is usually known as a “book famine” within the print disabled group.
Founded initially as self-advocacy group for people who find themselves blind or low imaginative and prescient with an curiosity in STEM, I-Stem goals to reinforce entry to this in any other case inaccessible content material for individuals with print disabilities. Through their previous expertise having skilled the challenges first-hand as blind co-founders, coupled with their expertise in engineering and AI, the crew makes use of AI to handle this barrier confronted by their group. Through help from Microsoft’s AI for Accessibility grant program, I-Stem know-how makes use of Microsoft’s Azure which helps to acknowledge inaccessible textual content and extract it for additional processing. This then is processed with customized fashions that assist establish the format and construction of the doc, thereby retaining the formatting and semantic illustration of the doc.
However, even with their superior AI methods, there’s at all times potential for errors. To bridge this hole, I-Stem combines AI with human intelligence, together with a human remediator to right points, reminiscent of a desk that was not recognized appropriately. To make this course of seamless and environment friendly for remediation at scale, the crew has developed a remediation portal. This retrieves the AI-generated output, then offers an intuitive interface for remediators to repair any errors, each when it comes to the format in addition to content material recognition. Currently being utilized by people, non-profits, training institutes and different enterprises, the purpose of this portal is to assist speed up the creation and conversion of accessible content material.
