VIJB: a companion of the JBROWSE genome browser for the visually impaired people
Abstract
>Motivation: The availability of touch-sensitive and haptic devices has been a keystone development for the inclusion of visually impaired people (VIPs) in modern, highly digitized work environments. Braille displays have proven efficient and versatile enough to parse large and complex text files, making bioinformatics and text-heavy programming accessible to VIPs. However, the complex graphical objects -combining numerous datasets-typically generated during data integration remain challenging, even with the aid of descriptive AI. This is particularly true in functional genomics. Here, we present VIJB, a simple application that displays the multilayered output of the JBROWSE genome browser on a Braille reader, enabling VIPs to fully participate in data integration in functional genomics. Availability and Implementation: VIJB is programmed in Python and relies on the scientific library NumPy, the braillegraph and pyBigWig libraries, and the TABIX software. The architecture is summarized in Supplementary Material 1, available as supplementary data at Bioinformatics online. VIJB is available for download at the GitHub repository https://GitHub.com/ NiBuMNHN/VIJB and is licenced under the GPL 3.0.
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BibTeX
@article{nashed2026vijb,
title = {{VIJB: a companion of the JBROWSE genome browser for the visually impaired people}},
author = {Salomé Nashed and Patricia Uguen and Laurent M Sachs and Nicolas Buisine},
journal = {Bioinformatics},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.1093/bioinformatics/btag396},
url = {https://hal.science/hal-05761143v1},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - JOUR
TI - VIJB: a companion of the JBROWSE genome browser for the visually impaired people
AU - Salomé Nashed
AU - Patricia Uguen
AU - Laurent M Sachs
AU - Nicolas Buisine
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/23
JO - Bioinformatics
DO - 10.1093/bioinformatics/btag396
UR - https://hal.science/hal-05761143v1
AB - >Motivation: The availability of touch-sensitive and haptic devices has been a keystone development for the inclusion of visually impaired people (VIPs) in modern, highly digitized work environments. Braille displays have proven efficient and versatile enough to parse large and complex text files, making bioinformatics and text-heavy programming accessible to VIPs. However, the complex graphical objects -combining numerous datasets-typically generated during data integration remain challenging, even with the aid of descriptive AI. This is particularly true in functional genomics. Here, we present VIJB, a simple application that displays the multilayered output of the JBROWSE genome browser on a Braille reader, enabling VIPs to fully participate in data integration in functional genomics. Availability and Implementation: VIJB is programmed in Python and relies on the scientific library NumPy, the braillegraph and pyBigWig libraries, and the TABIX software. The architecture is summarized in Supplementary Material 1, available as supplementary data at Bioinformatics online. VIJB is available for download at the GitHub repository https://GitHub.com/ NiBuMNHN/VIJB and is licenced under the GPL 3.0.
SN - 1367-4803
SN - 1367-4811
ER -