[Blindmath] poorly prepared tactile graphics

[Jared Wright]

All this is well and good, but for a single student, especially at a 
smaller university, getting a Braille embosser is the big hurdle. I 
tried telling my people at the start of school that they'd spend less 
money then on an embosser and the relevant software than they would for 
transcribing books through my whole schooling, and they didn't listen. 
And are paying for it now, as I refused to accept math or technical 
books that did not meet a certain level of accuracy and probably cost 
them quite a bit of money in the process. But, yes, it's that big, ugly 
pricetag on the embossers that is stopping this solution from being 
viable at a lot of U.S. institutions, at least. Outside of that 
spectrum, I cannot say. It sounds like the situation is not so touch and 
go other places.

Jared

On 3/14/2009 12:45 AM, John Gardner wrote:
> I have been observing this interesting conversation and becoming more and
> more convinced that there is something badly wrong here.  Why on earth
> should one pay a braille transcriber a great deal of money to produce a
> tactile graphic that one must order days, weeks, maybe months in advance
> that in the end is not readable by a blind person when there is a much
> faster better way to get this information?  Do we need forever to be locked
> in 19'th centurey technologies when we are now in the 21'st century?
>
> Before I go on I want to be sure that everybody reading this knows that I am
> about to describe a technology that was developed and that is for sale by my
> company (ViewPlus).  A technology that I invented precisely because of such
> problems that we see here in black and white.
>
> If you had a copy of IVEO Creator Pro, a touchpad, and some way to access a
> ViewPlus embosser, you could just make yourself a copy of any graph you
> wanted in a couple of minutes.  Better still, you could ask the university
> service agency to do it for you.  They would import the file or scan the
> paper image, maybe if they were really nice, crop out anything on the page
> that is not part of the graph, then save it as a SVG file.  They would then
> e-mail that SVG file to you and let you read it by the audio/touch method
> using the free IVEo Viewer and your touchpad.  They could make the tactile
> copy or let you make it yourself in the computer lab that has that ViewPlus
> embosser.  The graph would be a perfect image of the original, which would
> be a good graph if the author made a good one, or a lousy graph if the
> author was an idiot, but at least you have exactly what the sighted reader
> has.  You press a number on the x axis and it reads out in speech.  You
> press the label and it reads out.  You have very quick access to precisely
> the same graph that the sighted reader has.  You do not have a nice
> free-standing braille copy that can be read without the touchpad.  But you
> have almost real time access.  And the cost of the IVEo Creator Pro and
> touchpad to your university is about what they would pay the braille
> transcriber to make a single graphic.  They almost certainly already have
> the ViewPlus embosser if they are a major university.
>
>   John Gardner
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
> Behalf Of Susan Mooney
> Sent: Friday, March 13, 2009 5:14 PM
> To: Blind Math list for those interested in mathematics
> Subject: Re: [Blindmath] poorly prepared tactile graphics
>
> Unfortunately, there are several places producing braille which do not use
> certified braille transcribers or anyone experienced with teaching braille
> readers. Not all transcribers are great with tactile graphics and vice
> versa.  It's usually a team effort.  Some graphics which make sense and are
> useful to sighted students can become useless when rendered exactly for
> blind students.  Modifications can be done which do not change the graphic
> but do make it less cluttered and more easily discernible.  What looks
> "pretty" and great to the eye can be totally useless to the blind reader.
> Obviously it's very important for graphics to be precise but this precision
> can be accomplished in a highly readable way, again w/o the clutter.  Some
> graphics need to be displayed in what is called "overlays" or sections.
>
> I think it's helpful to not only you but to the braille production
> agency/company to know what the errors or weaknesses are and how they can
> correct them and/or modify the graphics.  It would also be helpful to tell
> the alternate media office at your school that the work you received was sub
> par and that they need to adjust payment or not use that particular company
> again.  As with any product, when a company is hit in the pocket book it
> forces them to change and bring their standards up.  Quality braille work is
> done by quality places.  Blind students should not have to settle.
>
> Susan M.
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