When postdoc Matthew Guberman-Pfeffer wants to read a journal article, he has to run through an obstacle course of potential problems. First, the Yale University physical chemist downloads the PDF and copies it into a separate text file. Then, he uses a screen reader to read each sentence aloud, going slowly because the reader often doesn’t recognize complicated scientific terms. Sometimes the column formatting doesn’t copy over correctly and the reader ends up dictating a jumbled mess. Sometimes it includes every single reference number; sometimes it stops midsentence to read out an advertisement.
But the biggest struggle is always the figures. There’s nothing a text reader can do to help him visualize them. He has some vision, so by magnifying a graph or diagram up to 1000% he can see one tiny fragment of the visual at a time, eventually piecing together a patchwork picture in a process he compares to the story of the blind men and the elephant. But usually it isn’t worth the effort, and he hopes whatever text description the authors gave of the figure is enough.
Phil Rufe has been a faculty member at Eastern Michigan University since 1990. He holds degrees in education, manufacturing, and mechanical engineering and is a Certified Manufacturing Engineer and Registered U.S. Patent Agent. Phil also completed the Massachusetts Institute of Technology course “Additive Manufacturing for Innovative Design and Production”. Currently he teaches in the Product Design Engineering Technology program and manages the 3D printing lab in the School of Engineering. Additionally he is a member of Stratasys’s Additive Manufacturing Education Customer Advisory Board and serves as a reviewer for the Ann Arbor LDFA (Local Development Finance Authority - “SmartZone”) Business Accelerator Grant program. He is also the editor and coauthor of the Fundamentals of Manufacturing, ed. and author of the Fundamentals of Manufacturing Workbook. While working at EMU he has received awarded $400,000 in external grant funding. Additionally, Phil was the School of Engineering Interim Director in 2017 and a from 2020 to 2022.
