[Blindmath] blind statistics data gathering

[Vincent Martin]

Hello:
I am planning on doing some data gathering in preparation of my Master's
Project and thesis concerning access to Statistics and to SPSS as well.
Since we are a research institution, all my work has to be framed towards
asking questions and finding solutions.  Part of what I am adding is also
finding out what barriers exist that hinder a blind high school student's
ability to complete their high school Statistics course.  Thankfully, there
are Georgia standards even for high school for teaching statistics, so we
can also utilize blind students in secondary schools as well.  

The questions that I would like to ask are things that relate directly to
the teaching of this specialized Mathematics class.  A good example of this
is the number of blind people that I have encountered that have made
excellent grades in their Algebra, Trigonometry, Geometry, Analytic
Geometry, and calculus classes but still make less than stellar or lower
than normal grades when they take an Introductory Statistics course.  I know
at Georgia Tech, the Psychology undergraduates have to take two semesters of
Calculus before they are allowed into the psychological Statistics class.
The concepts can be taught with just an understanding of Algebra, but they
have found that students gain a better grasp of it if they already know how
to do Calculus.

I know that just by knowing how the data is represented in graphical form
allows me to determine if something is statistically significant quite
easily.  Taking more statistics in graduate school has been much easier for
me, because I have a good visual memory of what the data looks like.  

I will probably use a survey for this data gathering process, but will use
the results to help guide our approach towards creating a more accessible
experience for blind students.  I also have identified areas where we can
create better configuration files with JAWS that can make SPSS function
better.  version 18.0 of SPSS works a lot better with JAWS and the JAVA
access bridge, but you still need a better grasp of the syntax editor than
sighted people need.  I also intend to incorporate more use of Excel for
importing and exporting the data and results.  Excel is extremely powerful
and many of the things we can use SPSS can also be done in Excel.  We all
know what happens in class when we don't use the same thing as our sighted
student do.  We get the short end of the educational stick.  The problem is
that we are then forced to use something differently than our sighted
counterparts use in class and on the job.  

I will meet with my advisor this week and start to work on my Survey.  I
will do some of the programming myself, but I do have a master's level
computer Science student that will be assisting me.  He has done a lot of
work with NVDA and has been incorporating some of our auditory output such
as the Sonification sandbox and auditory graphs into this open source
program.  We can't get much help from Freedom Scientific, so we will just do
it all ourselves.  



The survey and hopefully our research work will help to address making the
data output and visual representations of the introductory material more
accessible.  since our lab is a place that does research primarily with the
use of sound, it will be the primary approach and also we know that the cost
of doing everything tactilely can be extremely cost prohibitive.  We would
like to use a multi-modal approach, using tactile output and also using
Sonification to describe the representation of the output because we know
many blind people just cannot gather the relevant data without a tactile
representation of the data.  


-----Original Message-----
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Behalf Of blindmath-request at nfbnet.org
Sent: Saturday, January 29, 2011 1:00 PM
To: blindmath at nfbnet.org
Subject: Blindmath Digest, Vol 54, Issue 14

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Today's Topics:

   1. Re: Wikki Use with JAWS: A Question (Pranav Lal)


----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 1
Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2011 06:48:44 +0530
From: "Pranav Lal" <pranav.lal at gmail.com>
To: "'Blind Math list for those interested in mathematics'"
	<blindmath at nfbnet.org>
Subject: Re: [Blindmath] Wikki Use with JAWS: A Question
Message-ID: <00bd01cbbf52$7de58b50$79b0a1f0$@gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain;	charset="us-ascii"

Christine,

Docu wiki works well. For most wiki's you just click on the link called
"edit" and then edit using the wiki markup language. These languages vary in
their syntax. Most of your work will be done in one big edit box.

Pranav 




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