Structure and representation of documents and data

The growth of the Internet has brought society at large a lot closer together. A vast amount of data, which was once accessible only to a select few, has become accessible to a much wider audience. Three important aspects of the data are the richness of its structure, its searchability and its representation. Tools are available to produce an audio output of the document with cues, such as AsTeR or EmacsSpeak, or a braille output, or a combination of both, from the internal structurally rich representation of data. We discuss three tools that we have developed for providing access to information for the visually disabled. In Audio Formatting of a graph, we provide a textual representation of a graph which is a mathematical representation of relations. In this tool, we provide a textual representation of the data which captures the structure of the graph. We also suggest interesting problems for further work. In Aster Server, we provide a network server, that makes AsTeR (Audio System for Technical Readings) available over the Internet. Using this server, the user can paste a LaTeX marked-up document, submit it and receive a Dec-talk output in a MIME format. We discuss briefly the implementation of this server and suggest ways of improving servers and languages for the Internet.