SciA11y: Making Science Accessible in PDFs for Vision-Definite Scientists and Researchers with Low Visual Acuity, with Applications to National Institutes of Health
Nearly 220 data scientists have proved they are able to teach others how to manipulate and visualize data in the R programming language. The first blind instructor to gain certification was JooYoung SeO.
There are no good estimates of how many scientists with low vision are working today, but a 2020 study1 found that fewer than 100 of 52,124 researchers applying for funding from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2018 self-identified as having a visual impairment. It is a fraction of the work that was led by Bonnielin Swenor, an epidemiologist and director of the Disability Research Center at the University of Baltimore. That is not high compared to the total number of scientists with vision disabilities because ableist hurdles make it difficult for them to apply for research grants. It is a fraction of the total number of people in the US who have lost their vision and are not completely blind or partially blind. “If the goal is parity with prevalence in the US — which I argue it should be — we aren’t close,” she says.
screen readers are used for people with low visual acuity who don’t like to read text in it’s entirety.
Screen readers navigate documents using tags that identify elements such as tables and footnotes. But the devices often stumble on PDF files, which have long been the default digital format for journal articles and other research materials, because they generally lack such tags. The two-column format widely used in journals can also confuse screen readers, which generally read from left to right across a page. It’s difficult to make PDFs accessible and many publishers haven’t got there yet. “Improving PDF accessibility requires changes to culture, systems and processes that can be challenging for publishers to achieve,” says Jude Robinson, a global lead for Springer Nature Digital in London. We are committed to doing this. Nature has an editorial team that is independent of Springer Nature.
At the moment, SciA11y — ‘a11y’ is Internet shorthand for accessibility — is an online demo: researchers can upload PDFs to re-render them in HTML. Bragg says the team is still working on key functions. The software makes mistakes, such as failing to pull out headings and leaving them as body text. It also struggles with tables and images, which is a current focus of development.
The tables and images that visually impaired people use are even more difficult to solve than text itself. Precious little scientific literature — whether in PDF, HTML or another format — includes textual descriptions of figures, called alt text, that would enable a blind or low-vision person to understand the images. What’s more, it’s not always clear what sort of explanation would be most relevant. “There are different schools of thought,” says Amy Bower, a blind physical oceanographer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. “Should you just describe what’s there, or should you add the interpretation?”
Some researchers, including Bower, solve this issue by working with sighted interpreters. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge is collaborating with Hajas on a project that will allow users to navigate through different levels of description, from a single sentence to a more detailed description of the axes. Bar charts and scatterplots are some of the basic chart types that the team is working on new features for.
Seo is also developing a data visualization tool, and he is drawing on more than just speech. The tool, called the multimodal access and interactive data representation system (MAIDR), encodes data as both sounds — termed sonification — and Braille, providing tactile analysis with the help of a refreshable Braille display. Seo can hear the trend of the data and feel it.
As a child, Mona Minkara lost her vision due to her inability to read data through touch, but she is able to view it now thanks to touch. Minkara collaborated on a 2022 study4 that described representing data as 3D-printed graphics called lithophanes. The plastic thin enough for light to shine through can be used to make multiple forms of data, from the electron micrograph of a butterfly wing to the bands of an electrophoresis gel. The technology, she says, allows her and her sighted laboratory colleagues to engage with the same data at the same time.
Feeling a change in protein function through your fingers as a difference in thickness, for example, “adds a layer of knowledge”, she says, regardless of whether a researcher can perceive that change visually. “It’s going to embed into your imagination and be more a part of you, so you understand it on a deeper level.”
It is possible to see data in astronomy through the Sonification method. The Italian National Institute for Astrophysics in Rome says that most of the data they get are just numbers. But ears are much better at detecting faint signals, which is why we translate them into images. For example, a star’s brightness could be converted into sounds with certain parameters.
What do French astronauts and astronomers want from their space missions? A visit to France with France’s Minister of Higher Education and Research
A number of missions have been put on hold after their Vega rockets were grounded. Plus, astrobiologists train AI to find life on Mars and what the earthquake in Turkey tells us about the science of seismic forecasting.
The December launch failure of the Vega C could cause more delays if there are more missions. Two satellites were lost in the incident, caused by a faulty nozzle produced in Ukraine. Fifteen flights are now waiting for Vega C and the smaller Vega, which are both grounded until at least later this year. The space telescope had to be diverted to Florida, away from the European Spaceport in French Guyana. “It is not really easy to move a spacecraft from one launcher to another,” says Euclid mission manager Giuseppe Racca, “but we managed.”
France’s minister of higher education and research, in her first English interview since she took up the post, talks to Nature about her ambitions for science in France. Retailleau was trained as a physicist and took office last May. She said that her plan is to pour 7 billion into health innovation and more funding into riskier research and that she will find ways to simplify the lives of scientists.
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00695-w
Finding biosignatures on Mars through a machine-learning algorithm: the impact of geophysical and environmental impacts on geological fault prediction and risk assessment
A machine-learning algorithm that maps evidence of past or present life could help scientists to find such biosignatures on Mars. Researchers tested the algorithm on a three-square-kilometre area of Chile’s Atacama Desert, where it reduced their search area by up to 97% and increased their likelihood of finding endoliths, a type of rock-dwelling, photosynthetic organism, by up to 88%. It would take a little while for us to find life, if you placed us down at the end.
When would a large earthquake strike Turkey and Syria was a question that was asked decades ago. Decades of research have shown that it’s probably impossible to predict when a geological fault will start to shake. None of the warning signs that were once promising has stood the test of time. Faults are “grungy, messy features and they don’t behave as we would like them to”, explains Ross Stein, who heads a seismic-risk-assessment company. “The real focus in most of the world is not on prediction, but on assessing the hazard and the long-term rates of earthquakes,” says geophysicist Susan Hough.
Decolonization of the chemistry curriculum can come in lots of forms: update course material to include contributions from non-Western cultures or researchers, use examples of chemistry that solves a problem in low-income countries or ask students to reflect on where the papers they cite were produced. Teaching reactions, without focusing on the names of the people credited with discovering them, encourages students to think more deeply about chemical reactivity. The chemist says the efforts have nothing to do with losing the chemistry we have and are more about making the science more global.
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00695-w
Protein emojis in science communication: zero gravity water play date for astronauts on the Isitu Space Station and fuel tank design
When computational chemist Andrew White spotted that there was no protein emoji, he joined up with other scientists to submit their own. “Emojis are part and parcel of how we communicate now, and I think they’re an important addition to the arsenal of science communicators,” he says. White explained the procedure in case you want to try it yourself after his proposal did not make the cut.
An astronauts on the International Space Station is having a Zero-gravity water play date, which involves blowing on the water and using a straw to pull on it. You can drink if the bubble is small. Weightlessness is an opportunity to study fundamental physics, she explains, such as sloshing behaviour of fluids and gases in containers. The results are important for designing fuel tanks — both for use in space and on Earth. The read is 3 min.