Millions of students have a learning, physical, or visual disability that prevents a person from reading conventional print. The majority of educational materials for science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields are inaccessible to these students. Technology that makes the written word accessible exists. However, doing so for educational visuals like graphs remains complex and resource intensive. As a result, only a small fraction of educational materials are available for learners with this learning difference —unless machine learning could help bridge that gap.
The goal of this competition is to extract data represented by four types of charts commonly found in STEM textbooks. You will develop an automatic solution trained on a graph dataset.
Your work will help make reading graphs accessible to millions of students with a learning difference or disability.
Current efforts to make existing educational materials accessible are done through a manual process. Though this method produces accessible materials, it is expensive and time-consuming and has to go through several rounds of quality checking. Furthermore, the amount of effort involved in making these materials accessible often means these documents aren’t available for schools or teachers without the funding to license them.
Competition host Benetech is a nonprofit dedicated to reducing social and economic inequity in partnership with the communities that it serves through software for social good. Benetech’s initiatives are transforming how students, job seekers, and older adults across the globe read, learn, and work. Benetech believes that access to information is a human right, and no person should encounter barriers to education, literacy, or employment due to differences or disabilities.
The best submissions will be adopted into Benetech’s PageAI product, which converts books and other educational materials into accessible formats. You could have a hand in serving accessible STEM materials to millions of students with a learning difference or disability.
Awards:-
- 1st Place – $ 15,000
- 2nd Place – $ 10,000
- 3rd Place – $ 8,000
- 4th Place – $ 7,000
- 5th Place – $ 5,000
- 6th Place – $ 5,000
Deadline:- 05-06-2023
