Ecole Supérieure des Sciences et Techniques de Tunis,

This paper explains how to make scientific information more accessible to wide audience. It describes a practical system for scientific documents including mathematical formulas, named ‘EXTRAFOR’. The system recognizes scanned images of clearly printed mathematical documents and outputs the recognition results in XML format which can be converted into various formats: LATEX, MATHML, HTML and Brailles Codes. With EXTRAFOR, we are not only able to extract mathematical formulas automatically from image of documents but also to read, parse and re-use them in other applications and contexts. This can be done for a variety of purposes. An example of small-scale use is a reading machine for the visually impaired. Large scale use arises in the scanning and interpretation of a large collection of mathematical documents, for the creation of a database. Here, we investigate the use of such system to communicate scientific information to people with a visual impairment