VIJB: a companion of the JBROWSE genome browser for the visually impaired people

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. VIJB is available for download at the GitHub repository https://GitHub.com/NiBuMNHN/VIJB and is licenced under the GPL 3.0. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.