Document Navigability: A Need for Print-Impaired

Abstract: Printed documents continue to be a challenge for blind, low-vision, and other print-disabled (BLV) individuals. In this paper, we focus on the specific problem of (in-)accessibility of internal references to citations, footnotes, figures, tables and equations. While sighted users can flip to the referenced content and flip back in seconds, linear audio narration that BLV individuals rely on makes following these references extremely hard. We propose a vision based technique to locate the referenced content and extract metadata needed to (in subsequent work) inline a content summary into the audio narration. We apply our technique to citations in scientific documents and find it works well both on born-digital as well as scanned documents.