NavMol 3.0: enabling the representation of metabolic reactions by blind users

Summary: The representation of metabolic reactions strongly relies on visualization, which is a major barrier for blind users. The NavMol software renders the communication and interpretation of molecular structures and reactions accessible by integrating chemoinformatics and assistive technology. NavMol 3.0 provides a molecular editor for metabolic reactions. The user can start with templates of reactions and build from such cores. Atom-to-atom mapping enables changes in the reactants to be reflected in the products (and vice-versa) and the reaction centres to be automatically identified. Blind users can easily interact with the software using the keyboard and text-to-speech technology. Availability and implementation: NavMol 3.0 is free and open source under the GNU general public license (GPLv3), and can be downloaded at http://sourceforge.net/projects/navmol as a JAR file. Contact: joao@airesdesousa.com.