IMPROVING ACCESSIBILITY TO BUSINESS PROCESSES FOR

DISABLED PEOPLE BY DOCUMENT TAGGING

Norbert Kuhn, Stefan Richter and Stefan Naumann

Institute for Software Systems in Business, Environment, and Administration

University of Applied Sciences Trier, Location Birkenfeld, P.O. Box 1380, D-55761 Birkenfeld, Germany

Keywords: Workflow Management, Printed Forms Processing, Accessibility, Assistive Technology.

Abstract: Although many companies and governmental institutions have provided their costumers with access to

electronic information systems and to their processes, there still remains widespread use of paper-based

communication. In this paper we present an approach, which we use in the FABEGG system to make these

documents accessible to handicapped users. We discuss a prototypical system with both an administrative

and a user front-end to work with printed forms in business processes. Compared to purely electronic

solutions we can also cope with forms, which contain already process related data like for instance name,

address and other personal information of the recipient. The prototypes presented here will be evaluated in

local governmental authorities.

1 INTRODUCTION

In recent years much effort has been spent in Human

Computer Interfaces to improve access for

handicapped persons to computer systems (Mulleret

al. 1997). To a major extent these activities are

enforced by legislative constraints that exist in the

US (e.g. the Americans with Disabilities Act (United

States of America, 1990)) as well as in the European

Union (European Commission, 2000), and in its

member countries, like in Germany (Bundesrepublik

Deutschland, 2006).

In this paper we focus on the interfaces to

information systems for humans with visual

impairments. In general, there exists a variety of

hardware or software components to enable access

to computer systems for this group of users (for

early approaches see e.g. (Edwards, A. D. 1988,

Ballenger, W. L. 1979)). These tools are either

delivered as part of the operation system, e.g. screen

magnifiers in the Windows operation systems, or by

companies specialized in assistive technologies, e.g.

ScreenReader, Braille displays and text-to-speech

software, or they may be included as an additional

feature of a standard software system, like the

speech input/output facility in the Opera Internet

browser. We refer to http://www.barrierefrei-

kommunizieren.de for an overview of such tools.

For the design and implementation of such software

systems there exist guidelines, frameworks and

tools, e.g. (Sun Microsystems, 2006), (W3C, 2006).

These tools improve accessibility on the client side

for visually impaired users. However, they do not

consider the complete activity of information

processing. For instance, accessibility can be

improved by including additional information within

the document of interest or by special classification

algorithms to classify these forms.

From a process related point of view we may

observe that particularly governmental institutions

have been active to be present also in the Internet

and they have started to provide their services for

electronic access. However, when looking closer at

this development we may recognize that many of

these realizations only allow the citizens to

download particular forms, usually in PDF-format,

that have to be printed, filled and sent back to the

governmental institution. Furthermore, when an

institution contacts a citizen this usually happens by

paper mail. Often, these documents are forms that

are partially filled with personal data of the recipient

who is in charge to complete the form. It is obvious

that this process step is difficult to handle for

visually impaired people, elderly or dyslexic people,

or immigrants.

In the following we present an approach to

improve this situation by exploiting different

286

Kuhn N., Richter S. and Naumann S. (2007).

IMPROVING ACCESSIBILITY TO BUSINESS PROCESSES FOR DISABLED PEOPLE BY DOCUMENT TAGGING.

In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - HCI, pages 286-289

DOI: 10.5220/0002374802860289

 SciTePress

technologies e.g. from the fields of document

analysis and language processing.

2 FABEGG SYSTEM

ARCHITECTURE

The FABEGG system consists of different

components. The most important ones for the

underlying paper are on the one hand the component

that allows construction of a document repository by

a company or a governmental authority. We will

stretch the possibility to insert forms into the

repository and hence, refer to this component as the

forms front-end hereafter. The second component is

the one that enables the use of the repository and

will be referred to as user front-end in the following.

The document insertion is organized as follows:

A governmental authority feeds documents and

forms into a document and template repository via

the FABEGG forms front-end. For the discussion

within this paper we mainly focus on the insertion of

forms that are part of processes within the authority.

The FABEGG forms front-end allows the authority

to enhance the forms with metadata that is necessary

to process them later on. Furthermore, it allows

adding metadata to support visual impaired users to

understand and to process these forms.

The FABEGG user front-end builds on this

information to present documents. The user can scan

a document to process and he will then have

different modes of access to it. For example the

document can be displayed in certain colour

combinations, in an enlarged mode or it can be read

to the user (cf. section 5).

In the next sections we will describe these two

components in more detail.

3 FORMS FRONT-END

FABEGG provides an interface to insert forms or

general documents into a repository. This repository

can be used like an information centre for a

company or a governmental institution where

relevant information can be found and downloaded.

In the following we focus on the insertion of forms

that are usually presented to the citizens as printed

documents. For digital forms a similar procedure is

possible.

In order to guide a blind or visual impaired user

through the form a set of help texts can be associated

with the document. This comprises text to explain

the general processing steps of the form as well as

help texts for each field to explain the user the kind

of information that is expected to complete a field.

To enable the forms recognition step from the

digital image a set of anchors is associated with a

document or form. In general, anchors are areas

where certain content is expected or which have

special features that allow identifying the form or

the form template, respectively in the repository.

4 DOCUMENT

REPRESENTATION

Documents and templates are contained in the

document repository. The information that is

necessary to process a document is stored in an

XML-format that is partially depicted in figure 3.

The left-hand side of the figure shows an excerpt of

a form, which students have to maintain during a

practical phase of their education.

In this example there is one anchor, namely the

word “Laufzettel” in the headline of the document.

When this anchor is found the upper left-hand corner

of the surrounding box of the anchor will serve as

origin for the positions of the fields in the document.

Then completion of the form can start. The

information for the relevant input fields is stored in

the XML-format file, which is partially depicted on

the right-hand side of figure 1. Here, the definition

of the data fields is shown in some detail. For each

field the distance to the anchor is given and

additional information like a field id and a fieldname

is also available. The element <FieldValue>

contains the corresponding value filled in the form

on the left-hand side. This value is determined at

runtime when the particular form template is

processed. The FABEGG system will try to read the

text at the specified position in the document. In a

first step the text read can be checked for syntactical

correctness. In this case the system can check the

text whether it coincides with the type given in the

<FieldType>-Element. The function that should be

used is specified in the <ValidateFunc>-Element

referring to a function called “Check4ValidName”

in our example.

5 USER FRONT-END

The user interface consists of a camera unit,

speakers, and a display. The camera unit enables

easy document handling and fast document capture.

IMPROVING ACCESSIBILITY TO BUSINESS PROCESSES FOR DISABLED PEOPLE BY DOCUMENT TAGGING

287

The interface consists of standard hardware only and

hence, such a user terminal could be placed in any

major administrative department. In a real

environment the speakers could be headphones due

to privacy considerations.

On the display the document image captured by

the camera is displayed, where . different colour

combinations can be chosen. The image processing

is done in real-time (Hennen, C., 2004). Moreover,

after the document has been processed by an OCR

software it can be read by using a speech synthesis

software allowing text output in different velocities.

While reading the text the system highlights the

word which is actually spoken by drawing a

coloured rectangle around it. This enforces auditive

understanding. Other features like reading word by

word or sentence by sentence are already included or

can easily be considered. Along with this features

the FABEGG system provides humans with visual

impairements, dyslexic people or people with

problems in reading comprehension with better

access to printed information. The system is also

able to process common electronic formats like PDF

or HTML. The overall process is scetched in figure

In order to process a form based document the

user hands over a digital image to the FABEGG

system, e.g. by taking a picture with the camera in

the FABEGG station or by using a scanner. Then,

FABEGG automatically determines the type of the

form and retrieves the matching template. Thus, it

knows which fields should be already filled e.g. by

an authority and which ones have to be completed

by the actual user. The regarding control information

is given with the help of the XML-document in the

repository. FABEGG guides the user through the

process of document completion. Therefore, it can

read any information contained in the form and

provide help information on the expected input for

the fields.

After all required fields of the form are filled it is

transformed into a representation that can be inserted

into a further workflow. In some contexts it is

necessary therefore to print the document for having

the possibility to sign the form. In other cases the

form can be transmitted electronically to the next

recipient. For this purpose FABEGG supports

common electronic formats like PDF or XML.

These documents may then be sent by E-mail.

Another possibility is transferring the information by

using public interfaces, e.g. based on HTTP or even

Web Services. Hence, FABEGG also achieves an

improvement by avoiding media disruption in

process chains.

Figure 1: XML document representation.

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identification

form completion

- syntactic validation

(fieldtype)

- semantic validation

(contextual information)

e.g. Zipcode

names -> Zipcode

currencies

numbers

data

etc.

document /

template

repository

input devices

sample output formats

Figure 2: Detailed process for user client.

6 CONCLUSION AND FUTURE

WORK

In this paper we have presented the FABEGG

system, which provides humans with reading

disabilities with much better access to information

systems. In particular, access to printed documents,

which are still important in business processes or in

government applications, is substantially improved.

We have shown how the form-handling component

allows inserting forms into the system and how to

retrieve them later on. By identifying the

corresponding process using the information in the

document template repository FABEGG integrates

paper documents into electronic process chains. As

electronic forms can be processed as well, FABEGG

also helps to prevent media disruption. Furthermore,

we can cope with documents where form fields have

already been filled with individual information in the

process before the user receives the form. This type

of communication is quite general in nowadays

business processes and cannot be replaced easily by

switching to an electronic version.

We will evaluate the FABEGG system together

with some local government authorities in Germany.

This will give further insight to needs of the

intended user groups. Furthermore, we consider to

implement FABEGG as a client / server application

thus giving more possibilities for the user front-end.

This will enable the users to have access to the

system from their home. Then they can also

maintain their documents in their personal document

management system.

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