Patent ID: 8234593

Claim:
A method for permitting a low-vision user to synchronize two documents, the method comprising: providing an application residing on a computer, the application generating a visible document, the visible document including graphic and text elements that are visually displayed to the low-vision user by the computer, the graphic and text elements being arranged into a document object model; providing translation and server modules residing on the computer, the translation and server modules interacting with the application; traversing the visible document with the translation module and creating a node for each graphic and text element, the nodes being arranged into a node tree; traversing the node tree with the server module to create a virtual document, the virtual document comprising a representation of the visible document and including elements that correspond to the graphic and text elements of the visible document; the server module inserting text descriptions in the virtual document in place of the graphic elements in the visible document; the server module also inserting augmented text descriptions in the virtual document in place of the text elements in visible document; displaying the virtual document to the low-vision user by way of a screen reader; mapping offsets between elements within the virtual document to corresponding elements within the document object model and storing the mapped offsets in a virtual buffer; selecting virtual document elements within the virtual document and determining the location of corresponding elements within the visible document via the mapped values stored in the virtual buffer; visually displaying the selected elements in the visual document.