FSU English doctoral candidate receives NEH grant to improve visual accessibility
A 糖心vlog English doctoral candidate has been awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to improve accessibility of graphic and visual narratives for blind and low-vision readers.
Aaron Rodriguez, doctoral candidate in FSU鈥檚 History of Text Technologies Program, was awarded a $99,915 Digital Humanities Advancement Grant to develop and release a beta-level app for blind and low-vision readers to enhance their accessibility to graphic and visual narratives.
Rodriguez shares the grant with Wichita State University Professor of English Darren DeFrain. The two will continue work on the Vizling App that was initiated when Rodriguez was a master鈥檚 student at Wichita State.
鈥淲hen I started teaching, I had a student who had a macular hole and she was struggling to read comics in my class, and all the translation technology didn鈥檛 really work,鈥 Rodriguez said. 鈥淪he could still generally see what was happening on the page, but she couldn鈥檛 focus on the words and the speech bubbles. She could generally understand what was going on, so this app would work well for her.鈥
The app offers a touch-screen option for the blind and visually impaired to explore comics in three ways: global narrative or audiobook, narrative-grammar or panel-to-panel reading, and free exploration mode. In a short video tutorial, Rodriguez showed how the audio descriptions of the page content are activated by dragging a finger across the screen and stopping on a panel, a speech bubble or an object on the page.
The NEH awarded 20 Digital Humanities Advancement Grants, totaling $2.3 million. The funds, according to the NEH, support the implementation of innovative digital humanities projects that have successfully completed a start-up phase and demonstrated their value to the field.
Rodriguez said that while Vizling鈥檚 target audience is teachers, individuals can use the app as well. He points out that this technology is crucial as higher education institutions continue to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act, and that he and DeFrain are considering ways to make the app鈥檚 functions more universal.
鈥淲e鈥檙e using Vizling for comics, but we could conceivably embed this in Canvas, and then any instructor could take a multi-modal image and make that accessible,鈥 Rodriguez said. 鈥淭hinking about a biology textbook, and if you鈥檙e explaining mitosis, the image has a lot more meaning than the corresponding text. We could translate that to a way that is more accessible, not necessarily visual, but emphasizing the spatial nature of how the information is organized on the page.鈥
Krafft Professor of English Anne Coldiron is co-directing Rodriguez鈥 doctoral dissertation, which specializes in text technologies. She said his success is not surprising to her.
鈥淗is work has a lot of qualities that the wider world needs,鈥 Coldiron said. 鈥淎aron has excelled in my History of Text Technologies graduate seminars. His work interrogates the importance not just of media in literature but of entire systems of textual production, distribution and reception through which literary cultures are created.鈥
Rodriguez鈥 studies in Coldiron鈥檚 seminars have stretched from ancient inscriptions on stone to contemporary XML. He also has worked on medieval manuscripts and early modern incunables, or early printed books.
鈥淗e always historicizes and yet is transhistorical; he is attuned to historical contexts but thinks and works across period lines,鈥 Coldiron said. 鈥淗e has great digital chops and creativity, as the NEH project shows. He genuinely wants to learn and to contribute 鈥 this is not just about checking credential boxes for him.鈥
Robert O. Lawton Professor of English Gary Taylor is Rodriguez鈥 second dissertation director. Rodriguez said he chose FSU for his Ph.D. program because of Taylor鈥檚 expertise in History of Text Technologies. Taylor also is known worldwide for his work on Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
鈥淔or my doctoral preliminaries and my dissertation, he鈥檚 helped me figure how we can make Vizling, which has nothing to do with Shakespeare, have uses for Shakespeare productions,鈥 Rodriguez said. 鈥淚鈥檓 now interested in how I can apply this app to theater, which I never thought about before. Both page layouts and stage layouts are static, so if you鈥檙e visually impaired, you鈥檙e not going to be able to see. But that spatial layout is important for the viewer of the play.鈥
For more information about the English department, visit . To learn more about the NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant and other graduate award opportunities, visit the Office of Graduate Fellowships and Awards at .