[Blindmath] Biology - Expressing Formulas

[Roopakshi Pathania]

Hi Kevin,

There are 3 things you need to answer first, if not to the list, then at least to yourself.

- How are you reading/ getting these formulas in the first place, i.e. audio lectures, some kind of an accessible format (although the accessible formats for math are only3 or four, but that comes later).
- Do you want to write down these formulas for your own reference?
- Do you want to write these formulas down to submit them to your teacher?

As we discussed, iOS devices are not really useful when it comes to performing serious productivity tasks, especially math and science.
For one thing, accessible MathML is not going to appear anytime soon on Mac and iOS devices, which also means that ePub books that may have embedded MathML in future won't be fully accessible on Apple products.
LaTeX and its simpler version- ASCII text -also can't be properly read on an iOS device since VoiceOver does not support reading of all punctuations.
Believe me, I have tried all that and much more.

I love my iPod Touch, but I also realize its limitations.
What most iOS apps do is to make you feel pseudo-productive.
For example, there are many calculators for your iOS devices, but technically if you're good at math, you really shouldn't need most of them.
Writing programming code on an iOS device is a pain in the ****, not to mention that you have no way of immediately running it.
I have been looking for accessible graphing and stock charting apps for a long time, but beyond the interactive stock charts that come with your iOS device, no app provides the ability of exploring a graph and listening to its values, even though the touch screen is ideal for this kind of interaction. I'm involved in getting researchers interesting in making such an app. 

My point is that while you can do most of day-to-day work on your iPhone or your iPad, Windows is for now the only way of completing specialized tasks for blind users.


Sent from my Lenovo ThinkPad

--- On Fri, 6/3/11, Kevin Chao <kevinchao89 at gmail.com> wrote:

From: Kevin Chao <kevinchao89 at gmail.com>
Subject: [Blindmath] Biology - Expressing Formulas
To: "Blind Math list for those interested in mathematics" <blindmath at nfbnet.org>
Date: Friday, June 3, 2011, 10:08 AM

I'm taking a Biology 101 summer course, which started Tuesday, May 31.

I've ran into some issues with lecture portion, which I'll outline.
* formulas - elements/compounds, such as H2O
* Greek Symbols, sigma,
* arrow pointing to right, arrow pointing to left and right, long
arrow point to right with short to left,
* superscripts and subscripts
Issue I'm having with these different points is the ability to express
them with iOS devices (iPhone 4 and iPad 2), Apple bluetooth keyboard,
Plain Text, and VoiceOver as primary for this week.
I have iWork Pages, Notebooks, Text Writer, and other productivity
apps, which may do trick, more powerful, and look forward to your
recommendations.
As a last resort, I have a Windows 7, Office 2010, and JAWS/NVDA

I'm interested in what advise do you have.

Thanks,

Kevin

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