Chemoinformatics tools for the processing of chemical information by visually impaired users

The representation of molecular structures is a major challenge for the accessibility of blind students to chemistry, particularly organic chemistry. Learning organic chemistry is impossible without the reception, interpretation, and transmission of molecular structures, and these are commonly processed visually, by means of chemical drawings.
 
At the same time, information technology revolutionizes the life of blind and visuallt impaired (BVI) people to an extent difficult to imagine by non-blinds. Computer interfaces for visually impaired users, such as text-to-speech software and text-to-Braille refreshable displays, enable the proficient manipulation of non-graphical applications and data, as well as the access to the Internet.
 
Chemoinformatics can immensely assist blind students in the processing of molecular structures. Computers store molecular structures not only as drawings but rather as graphs, i.e. by specifying atoms, their bond connections, and their geometrical configuration.

We have previously developed strategies to teach chemistry to BVI, namely relying on chemoinformatics technology, which can be found in the web portal MOLinsight, and included the processing of molecular structures with the program NavMol 1.0. This had a command-line interface, readable by text-to-speech software and the capability to navigate and edit simple molecular structures. More recently we made available a new version of NavMol (v2.0), specially designed to enable BVI users the navigation, editing and saving of molecular structures, including those with chirality, and their combined use in chemical reactions. NavMol 2.0 uses voice synthesizers to convey the information shown on the computer screen, as well as chemoinformatics tools for the automatic perception of structural features.

The new version of NavMol (v. 2), was written in Java, and its architecture supported by the Chemistry Development Kit (CDK) software library, using the FreeTTS speech synthesizer as the main text-to-speech (TTS) system, and eSpeak software as a secondary TTS system, which supports several languages.  Presently, only English and Portuguese are supported, but any user can easily convert NavMol 2.0 to his/her native language by translating the existent language file. Integration with popular screen readers such as JAWS and NVDA is possible. The NavMol software is published as open source under the GNU general public license (GPLv3).

Refs:

1. F. Pereira, J.C. Ponte-e-Sousa, R.P.S. Fartaria, V.D. Bonifácio, P. Mata, J. Aires-de-Sousa, A.M. Lobo, "Sonified Infrared Spectra and Their Interpretation by Blind and Visually Impaired Students", J. Chem. Educ. 2013, 90(8), 1028–1031.

2. R.P.S. Fartaria, F. Pereira, V.D.B. Bonifácio, P. Mata, J. Aires-de-Sousa, A.M. Lobo, "NavMol 2.0 – A Molecular Structure Navigator/Editor for Blind and Visually Impaired Users", Eur. J. Org. Chem. 2013, 8, 1415–1419.

3. F. Pereira, J. Aires-de-Sousa, V. D. B. Bonifacio, P. Mata, A. M. Lobo, "MOLinsight: A Web Portal for the Processing of Molecular Structures by Blind Students", J. Chem. Educ. 2011, 88(3), 361–362.