NoVAGraphS: Towards an Accessible Educational-Oriented Dialogue System

NoVAGraphS is an ongoing project on educational-oriented dialogue systems, specifically designed to be accessible by visually impaired individuals. The main goal of the project is the design and the realization of conversational interfaces for accessing images with an internal graph structure such as UML and E-R diagrams, functional diagrams, and electrical circuits. At the heart of the NoVAGraphS project lies NoVABOT, a dialogue system for Italian and English based on AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language), an open standard scripting language for dialogue systems. We devised NoVABOT as a web application, implementing a textual dialogue system fully compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1, with the aim to allow blind people to use their usual speech-recognition/text2speech interfaces (a screen reader). The development of the dialogue system was carried out using an open-source library that was extended with new features to enable the manipulation of mathematical formulas and images. In this paper we present the main features of the system together with two preliminary evaluations with blind students and teachers who work with visually-impaired students on the specific topic of functional diagrams. These experiments revealed how VIP benefit from using conversational interfaces and how the alternative dialogical representation provided by NoVABOT allows users to explore the diagrams and solve related problems. Moreover, the teachers appreciated the capabilities that such a system could provide students.