The 4th International Workshop on
"Digitization and E-Inclusion in Mathematics and Science 2021" (DEIMS2021)

18-19 February 2021, at Nihon University, Tokyo, Japan

• Home
• Call for Papers
• Organizing Committee and International Program Committee
• Program
• Keynote Lecture
• Registration and Participation Fee
• Venue and Access
• Accommodation

DEIMS2021 Keynote Lectures:

Keynote1: "Accessible PDF: 2≯1."

Dr. Neil Soiffer, Talking Cat Software, USA

Some people feel the accessibility of PDF documents is inferior to that of other formats such as HTML and Word. Theoretically it is possible to make PDF documents very accessible, approaching the accessibility of content in HTML and docx formats. When it comes to mathematics, PDF documents commonly suffer from inferior accessibility due to the complexities of PDF’s internal structure: two parallel trees for content and markup rather than a single tree incorporating both. Making math accessible in PDF is technically demanding, as the trees must be tightly interlinked for fully accessible results. An important new feature in PDF 2.0 leads to a technically simple solution for content creators of mathematical expressions in PDF. It is also a solution that is easily handled by assistive technologies.

Dr. Neil Soiffer received a B.S. in math from MIT and a M.S. and PhD in Computer Science from Berkeley. He has worked at Textronix’s Computer Research Lab, Wolfram Research, Design Science, and consulted for many other companies.

Dr. Soiffer is a principal architect of MathML and Design Science's MathPlayer math accessibility product. In addition to MathML, he has helped develop several standards including DAISY, EPUB3, NIMAS, and PDF/UA. He currently chairs the W3C MathML Refresh Community Group.

Keynote2: "Conversion of School textbooks in PDF into Accessible EPUB3"

Dr. Masakazu Suzuki, NPO: Science Accessibility Net, Japan

We have been working on the digitization of school textbooks for math and science to convert them into accessible audio books: Multimedia Daisy and EPUB3 with aloud reading as media overlay for a long time (since 2009). The audio books as the result have been mainly distributed to the disabled students with dyslexia by the Japanese Society for Rehabilitation of Persons with Disabilities (JPRPD). In the process, we have been working on the improvement of the audio-book quality and also on the investigation of the methods to reduce time/effort for producing the audio books from PDF. In the keynote lecture, I will talk about our recent workflow for this job, in which the management of collaborating automatic processes with manual works is crucial. Unsolved problems and steps to improve in our workflow will be also discussed.

Dr. Masakazu Suzuki received a B.S. and a M.S. in math from Kyoto University and PhD in math from the University of Paris VII. He had worked at Kyushu University during April, 1977 – March, 2010. He is now Emeritus Professor at Kyushu University.

Dr. Suzuki is the team leader of the InftyProject and the chair of NPO: Science accessibility Net (sAccessNet). For more-than-20 years, the Infty team has been working on developing assistive tools to enable print disabled people to access STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) information. They also founded Non-Profit Organization: sAccessNet to provide the disabled people with their technologies and services in 2005. Their main products are an OCR system for STEM documents: "InftyReader" and accessible STEM-document editor: "ChattyInfty."

* Unfortunately, illness has indisposed for Prof. Georgios Kouroupetroglou for a keynote lecture, and it is canceled.

If you have any questions, please contact Katsuhito Yamaguchi at
The workshop contact e-mail address: deims2021-office "@" mail.sciaccess.net
(please remove quotation marks included in the above address)

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