Chaucers General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales as a Case for Accessible Scholarly Editions Using TEI-Encoded Uncontracted Braille

Access to literary materials that meet the rigorous standards of critical editions remains challenging for textual scholars who have print disabilities. Conversely, though, the many assistive technologies available to people with print disabilities prove particularly useful to those in the field of bibliography and textual criticism. The application of these assistive technologies to textual studies could open this discipline to all interested scholars regardless of their ability to examine a document visually, thus moving the field positively in the direction of universal design. This article considers the General Prologue to Geoffrey Chaucers The Canterbury Tales as a demonstration case for the application of assistive technologies to provide access to scholarly literary materials. More specifically, I propose combining the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) tagging system with uncontracted Braille to provide full descriptive access to documents and all of their features, even if the scholar cannot visually read a word of text.

Overview