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NPO Science Accessibility Net

1. Activity

Science Accessibility Net (sAccessNet) is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to, "support students with print disabilities" wishing/needing to learn and excel in STEM (science, technology, engineering ,and math) disciplines. A person with a print disability cannot effectively read and acquire knowledge from print materials because of a visual, physical, perceptual, developmental, cognitive, or learning disability. Using our software applications (described below) sAccessNet produces K-12 STEM-based e-textbooks in accessible formats. These formats include Braille, ePub3, and multimedia DAISY which is an international standard format for accessible e-books. Multimedia DAISY school textbooks are delivered to students from the Japanese Society for Rehabilitation of Persons with Disability, and used by more than 15 thousand students now. In addition, we conduct "jump-to-science" summer camps every two years to encourage visually impaired high school students learning science.

For more details about our activity, please visit http://www.saccessnet.com (Japanese site).

2. Software development and release

sAccessNet, in cooperation with the "InftyProject" research group, has been researching and developing advanced applications, designed to enable students with print disabilities to access STEM content and successfully acquire knowledge from it. These advanced applications are also being used by sighted professionals who support students with print disabilities. Our applications are described below:

1. InftyReader (Ver.3.3.2.3, Feb. 15, 2023)

(*) E-born PDF is the PDF produced by authoring tools such as LaTeX system, MS Word, Adobe InDesign, etc. The PDF produced from image files are called Image PDF.

For more information about InftyReader and download, please click HERE.

2. ChattyInfty (Ver.3.2.7e, July 31, 2023)

"ChattyInfty" is an accessible STEM-document editor with speech output. Through the use of ChattyInfty, blind people can both "read" and "author" STEM documents including math expressions easily and intuitively. In addition, our ChattyInfty V3 series enables users to save math documents as an audio-embedded accessible e-book such as Multimedia DAISY, accessible EPUB3, iBook for the iPad ,and ChattyBook(Audio HTML).

Using ChattyInfty, students with print disabilities can share STEM content as well as with their sighted classmates/teachers without needing any translation.

For more information about ChattyInfty and download, please click HERE.

3. InftyEditor (Ver.3.3.1b, July 31,2023. Free.)

InftyEditor is an authoring tool of STEM documents for sighted people. Using it, they easily create complicated math expressions easily and intuitively. InftyEditor uses the same output format as ChattyInfty.

For more information about InftyEditor and download, please visit the website of InftyProject.

In ChattyInfty and InftyEditor, you can input any math expressions keeping your hand on the HOME Position of your keyboard. The input math expressions are displayed immediately in the form of printing style as you usually see in books. They have a strong Help of command names or syntax to input math expressions based on LaTeX. Thus, ChattyInfty and InftyEditor can be used also as a Learning Tool for LaTeX, for the beginners of LaTeX. The edited documents can be saved in different formats: XML of InftyEditor, LaTeX, MathML, Human Readable TeX for the blinds, PDF, as well as MS Word document.

If InftyReader is installed on your PC, you can input texts and math expressions from the printed documents via scanner into InftyEditor and ChattyInfty directly.

4. ChattyBooks (Ver.2.05 beta3, April 10,2020. Free.)

ChattyBooks is a new type of Multimedia Daisy / EPUB3 Player usable on Windows 10 and 11. It converts Multimedia Daisy 2.02 or EPUB3 books having media overlay audio(reading voice) into audio-embedded HTML5 with JavaScript, called "ChattyBook".
ChattyBook can be played with various browsers, such as Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Microsoft Edge ,and Internet Explorer. It works completely the same way as the usual Multimedia DAISY.
For more details, please visit the page ChattyBooks.

4. Inquiry