Chemistry in Digital Books

[GeorgeKerscher]

Associated with a grant from the Department of Education in the USA, we are looking at how to provide published Chemistry content to the mainstream, and to persons with disabilities that use Assistive Technology (AT).

We are just starting this fact finding phase. ChemML has been mentioned, but we are not married to any particular solution. I am fairly sure we will need a great looking presentation, and we will need semantic information that can be explored chunk-by-chunk using AT.

[petermr]

George, I am one of the 2 co-authors (Henry Rzepa is the other) of CML (sic) and would be happy to see if it could help. CML has the ability to annotate chemistry in a way that no other representation can do. I would love to see new approaches here. Mail me at pm286 AT cam DOT ac DOT uk ? Also worth contacting Volker Sorger in Birmingham UK who has been doing work with visually impaired chemists.

[dauwhe]

Of course we need to solve this problem for the entire web, not just EPUB :)

Has anyone looked at representing CML with custom elements? I expect the rendering would get very complex, but finding gaps in CSS would be most useful, and filling those gaps could be fodder for the Houdini project.

[petermr]

Greetings, (I hope this reply gets through) Henry (copied) and I are the authors of CML and would be interested in how CML could support assistive technology. We designed it so that it was a flexible language (unlike other chemical representations). It will interoperate with other W3C protocols such as XSLT, MathML and particularly SVG. I have created animated chemical reactions in CML/SVG , including electron "bookkeeping" . I have also developed tools for extracting bitmaps into CML (mainly organic). Chemistry is a very broad subject and so we would need to know the spread. Some subjects, such as nanotechnology are very complex and very difficult to represent. However if your concentration is high-school then I would be optimistic. My group in Cambridge also developed a chemical editor (Chem4Word) and we built some simple assistive tools for editing chemical structures - rather like Dasher for words. I would rewrite these from the bottom up now.

Look forward to hearing

P.

On Wed, Jul 25, 2018 at 9:35 PM, Dave Cramer notifications@github.com wrote:

Of course we need to solve this problem for the entire web, not just EPUB :)

Has anyone looked at representing CML with custom elements? I expect the rendering would get very complex, but finding gaps in CSS would be most useful, and filling those gaps could be fodder for the Houdini project.

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[pkra]

Since I posted this on the email thread as well: Volker Sorge's work (@zorkow) is highly relevant and handles many formats http://www.progressiveaccess.com/chemistry/index.php.

[zorkow]

I've worked extensively on accessible structural formulas and developed a fully automatic workflow to transform a bitmap images into accessible SVG diagrams. Have a look at some examples here. As chemical representation it uses CML plus embedded custom elements in a separate namespace. In fact you could do the accessibility with the custom elements alone. But if you already have CML --- or MOL or some other chemical identifier, from any chemical drawing program or just from Wikipedia --- it is effectively is perfect. The format also works as a basis for audio tactile diagrams (e.g., with the ViewPlus tools). We have just published it as best practice of publishing in the Netherlands with Dedicon

So I would regard the problem as solved for accessible representations of structural formulas.
Reaction diagrams still need a bit of work, but really only on the recognition side.

[GeorgeKerscher]

I emailed this out. Dear Chemistry interested folks,

I am sending this to the EPUB 3 Community Group, which has as one of our objectives to establish best practices. I am also copying others who expressed interest in Chemistry.

In this email, I am providing a link to the minutes, and a link to the recording of the kick-off conference call. We also decided that our next call will be on Wednesday February 20 at 15 UTC, which is 7:00 a.m. Pacific, 11:00 New York, 16:00 London, and 17:00 Zurich. The Zoom video calling instructions are at the end of this message.

The minutes can be found at: https://www.w3.org/2019/02/06-epub3cg-minutes.html

Link to the recording: http://dl.daisy.org/Chemistry-call-Feb-6-2019.m4a

This meeting will be hosted on the Zoom system. Join from PC, Mac, Linux, iOS or Android: https://zoom.us/j/4065494687 Or dial in on one of the numbers below, using the meeting id: 406-549-4687

[jessica-white-macmillan]

Hi everyone, I thought it might be helpful to start collecting examples of alt text for structure images at various levels, since I think the level will have a big impact on what type of alt text is appropriate.

For example, at the college freshman level, where the students are first learning how to draw Lewis structures, here's an example of the type of alt text I have used in the past (it's probably terrible, but I'm hoping this group can give me some feedback on that). "Structure of N O F. N has one pair of dots. N is connected by a single line to F which has three pairs of dots. N is also connected by a double line to O which has two pairs of dots."

Then, later in the course, once the students know how to translate between structural formulas and condensed structures, is it appropriate to use the condensed structure as the alt text? For example, here's what I might say for ethanol. "Structure of ethanol. C H 3, C H 2, O H"

What do you think?

[garconvacher]

@jessica-white-macmillan, don't forget braille even it's tricky ;)

• Most of braille codifications have their own way to write formulas.
• Structural and condensed formulas are different in braille too.

[jessica-white-macmillan]

Hmm. Are you saying alt text also needs to include braille? Can you elaborate so I know how to make your comment actionable?

[garconvacher]

Alt text is not sufficient when the content must be accurate. Especially for the complex content.

The best way would be to have an alt text and a braille transcript in addition to the content for sighted people. But this three ways rendering is tricky.

At work, one of our techniques is to hide the 'graphical' content to AT (aria-hidden) and to reproduce the adapted content, itself invisible on the screen (CSS screen-reader class). 'screen-reader class' may contain alt text in addition to braille.

Our other technique is for math. We use MathML with an alt text and we offer to the reader an alternative to switch to braille. My colleague made a script (JS) for this. This technique is really good for mathematics or physical science books.