[Blindmath] Mathematica and JFW

[Stewart Dickson]

Hi,

I'm Stewart Dickson.  I live in Champaign, IL and just had a meeting at 
Wolfram Research last week.
I have found some new details on the old information pertaining to 
accessible use of Mathematica.
Nobody at Wolfram Research really knows much about accessible use of 
Mathematica beyond the article
they published in 2004 about a specific individual who has succeeded in 
interfacing access technology to Mathematica.
http://www.wolfram.com/news/strickland.html
http://www.mathematica-journal.com/issue/v9i2/news.html
That individual is Chuck Strickland, an blind optical physicist who has 
worked with Mathematica at Southwest Texas State University, University 
of California, Riverside, Truman State University  and who now works 
with the United States space program at  NASA Goddard Space Flight 
Center in Greenbelt, MD.

In what I have read, it appears that Chuck Strickland used Mathematica 
in classes he taught at Truman State University.
But, they do not have seem to have retained any documents on non-visual 
use of Mathematica at the Department of Physics
web site: http://physics.truman.edu    Here is Truman State's Library 
Assistive Technology Lab:
http://library.truman.edu/about-us/assistive-technology.asp

The Wolfram Research article of 2004 mentions "electronic notepad", a 
"refreshable Braille" device and "a camera connected to a tactile 
display made of vibrating pins that essentially allow him to feel 
pictures".   Mathematica's ability to convert data graphs to sounds has 
been around for a long time.

"Strickland transfers the electronic Braille to his PC where the 
Mathematica program converts it to rich text. The rich text can then be 
manipulated with a word processor. Strickland has also written 
Mathematica procedures that replace certain character sequences with 
equations or other graphics."   One of Wolfram Research's big points is 
using Mathematica notebook files to
prepare papers for publication.

Here is a link to an article about Chuck Strickland's Wavefront Sensing 
and Control research group at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.    
http://gsfctechnology.gsfc.nasa.gov/Savoring.htm   GSFC does not have a 
personnel directory,
so I think that the only way to find out more about Chuck Strickland's 
accessible Mathematica is through the GSFC's
Office of the Chief Technologist.  
http://gsfctechnology.gsfc.nasa.gov/About.html

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

-Stewart, http://us.imdb.com/Name?Stewart+Dickson    
http://www.ifp.uiuc.edu/~sdickson
http://www.ifp.illinois.edu/~sdickson/Tactile_Math.html
http://emsh.calarts.edu/~mathart/Tactile_Math.html
http://emsh.calarts.edu/~mathart/MathArt_siteMap.html

Sarah Jevnikar wrote:
> I know the topic of Mathematica and jaws has been raised in the past, but I
> can't find the list archive pertaining to it. I just downloaded a trial
> version of Mathematica to see if it works, but am not having much luck.
> Could someone please help or perhaps send me the link to the archive so we
> don't have to repeat ourselves too much?
> Thank you,
> Sarah Jevnikar
>
>
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