[Blindmath] access to statistics for blind students

[Susan Jolly]

Vincent, before I forget, Touch Graphics and its consultants have done a lot 
of work on making statistics, especially introductory statistics, accessible 
so your advisor should definitely contact them to benefit from their 
experience and to avoid reinventing the wheel
http://touchgraphics.com/
http://www.touchgraphics.com/staff-annettegourgey.htm

Second, speaking as a sighted computational scientist with long experience 
in education, mathematics, and software development (though not statistics 
per se) I agree with everything Dr. Godfrey wrote

In fact, I think everyone who uses computers to do something useful should 
be familiar with command-line interfaces.  Although someone on this thread 
indicated that this approach is new it is actually old and I believe it is 
criminal if blind high schoolers don't become adept at using and also 
developing their own command-line tools. There were many successful blind 
programmers and blind software engineers in the earlier days of computing 
before GUIs began to dominate.

In my own case I much prefer using my own simple scripts to support my 
programming efforts (actually bat files since I work in Windows) rather than 
using a complex GUI-based Integrated Development Environment (IDE) such as 
NetBeans.  Yes NetBeans might save me a few keystrokes here and there but it 
doesn't think the way I do and the mental effort to learn and effectively 
use its paradigm just doesn't work for me.

As a different example to support the value of what Dr. Godfrey wrote about 
thinking how to display a certain data set rather than letting a GUI present 
you with a filtered selection of options, an IDE will fill in the name of a 
class or method once you start to type it which saves you from having to 
remember.  However, I've found that I write much cleaner code if I stop and 
try to figure out why I can't remember something about the rest of the code 
I'm developing since that failure is often a clue that my code is poorly 
designed and could use some refactoring.

Sincerely,
SusanJ