[Blindmath] Learning Calculus

Paul Wright paulrite at math.umd.edu
Tue Aug 16 02:43:19 UTC 2011


Hi Ben,

As a JAWS user who also teaches intro Calculus courses, I thought I
would write in to give you my encouragement and advice.

First, I haven't used Learning Ally's calculus texts, but others on this
e-mail list have had very good things to say about learning from them,
so my guess is that if they have the same text as the one used by your
university, that is probably a good option.

Second, I really love LaTeX, and it works reasonably well with the
editor TeXnic Center and JAWS.  I'd never heard about Edsharp  before,
but I was just reading about it on-line, and it sounds very promising. 
I'll definitely give it a try myself.  However, I did want to point out
that in beginning calculus, especially the first couple of semesters,
you are unlikely to run into seriously complicated math formulas.  If
you find that you are spending too much time learning LaTeX, you may
want to just write out your work using words and symbols, and it will
probably be just as clear to your instructors.  Along the same line of
thought, it depends on your instructors, but they may well be willing to
accept plain LaTeX code as your solutions; for the basic formulas, it is
pretty easy for a sighted reader familiar with the code to just read.

You can definitely use Matlab with JAWS, but I have little experience
with it's graphics capabilities, so I probably can't help you much
there.

Please feel free to contact me off list if you'd like to chat some more.

Best,

Paul
----------------------------------- 
  Paul Wright
  Department of Mathematics
  University of Maryland
  http://www.math.umd.edu/~paulrite





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