[Blindmath] How many children in America are not taught to read?

[Mary Stores]

With statistics there are just things you can't really verbalize as 
well as seeing it (reading it in Braille) written down. Math was never 
my strong suit, but I think I would have failed miserably if it wasn't 
for Braille.

Quoting Michael Whapples <mwhapples at aim.com>:

> I have to say that a Braille display is far superior to speech access
> to a computer for me. Now may be some of my experience with a Braille
> display being better is to do with the software I use (particularly
> first example I will give). So on to the examples of when a Braille
> display is useful.
>
> A Braille display is really good for viewing tables and being able to
> extract information easily. Now this can depend on the software being
> used, for me on linux using brltty in a text terminal I get all the
> proper layout and with the Braille display navigation keys I can move
> about the display easily and read down columns or across rows without
> any issue (eg. when I am looking for train times in the UK, I use the
> national rail enquiries website in the links browsers and brltty).
> Now compare this with many of the windows screen readers which do
> their own reformatting of the page and so break this nice table
> layout in Braille. Also on this topic of layout, a Braille display is
> so handy for when I am doing computer programming, partly as speech
> doesn't read the line exactly well (due to the need for punctuation,
> and variable names not being single words all the time) and also for
> tracking the code indentation level.
>
> Now to another example of where a Braille display and possibly
> Braille more generally is useful, mathematics (I knew I could bring
> this thread round to being on topic some how). While software like
> mathplayer is good in what it does, I just feel trying to do maths by
> speech output is very hard, mainly due to the lack of direct access
> to what ever part of the equation I want to check. Now the Braille
> display allows me to get a mathematical document and then use some
> software to translate it to Braille and I have instant access (eg. I
> get a mathml document and so use liblouisxml to translate it and then
> I can read it on a Braille display). In this case it is better to
> have the Braille display as it reduces on the bulk of physical
> Braille documents, no chance of running out of Braille paper, etc.
> How ever I do feel sometimes having the full page in front of me is
> better than just having a single line on a Braille display, but I
> suppose they have different uses.
>
> Are Braille displays perfect, no, it would be nice to have features
> such as full page displays, tactile graphic displays, etc and
> obviously a lower price tag would be very nice.
>
> Michael Whapples