aScience: A Thematic Network on Speech and Tactile Accessibility to Scientific Digital Resources

At present, digital scientific resources can be hardly read by visually impaired people. The systems to retrieve and download documents in digital libraries can be easily used also through speech and tactile assistive technologies. The main problems concern the digital formats employed to store documents. Therefore, visually impaired readers often find the right document, but they cannot read it. That often affects the learning process especially at university. In order to contribute to the preparation of guidelines to provide accessible digital scientific resources and to widespread best practices and best experiences achieved by university libraries and support services, the thematic network aScience was established. It is a two years project supported by the European Union eContentPlus Programme. The web portal www.ascience.eu delivers information about the thematic network activities and it will distribute sample documents of digital scientific literature accessible through speech and tactile assistive technologies.