[Blindmath] accessible online math resources

Wed May 11 14:16:46 UTC 2011

Hi Everyone,

I just wanted to add my own perspective to Ken's comments.  I find that
having a reader (preferably one with at least some mathematical
sophistication) record math to be a fairly decent way to have math
presented.  This is what I do in order to get access to the scholarly
articles I am working on.  After a while, you kind of get into it, and
you can understand a lot from the context and the reader's tone of
voice.  This helps a great deal, in the same way that you can
distinguish, "I read the newspaper every day," (present tense) from, "I
read the newspaper last night," (past tense) -- even though "read" is
spelled the same in both phrases.  You can fairly well tell what is
going on without hearing all of the nuances needed to precisely convey
technical information -- for example subscripts versus superscripts.

On the other hand, I can see the value of using Braille, so that you can
read an equation in it's entirety, without just having a single
character at a time read to you.  For example, I imagine that trying to
learn how to solve "8x+7=12x-3" is probably easier using Braille,
although I can't say for sure.

Anyway, I would like to see a solution so that mathematics printed in
standard formats (such as PDF documents generated by LaTeX) without the
author having originally done some special extra things (that they
probably will never do...)  I do not find MathML to be particularly
useful for complicated expressions, and certainly not for large
documents.  Has anyone on the list ever used or heard of Emacsspeak
and/or AsTeR?  They seem very narrowly oriented, but at least a
reasonable step in the right direction.

Best,

Paul

On Wed, 11 May 2011 09:50 -0400, "Ken Perry" <kperry at blinksoft.com>
wrote:
> 
> 
> I was waiting for other replies to this because I accidently deleted the
> question.  Anyway I know most hate learning math from recordings but I
> did all my college work with the RFBD tapes.  I found them very good. 
> Now that most are online for downloading It might be a good resource. 
> The hard part is knowing where to start so you don't get lost.    I guess
>  start where you are in school and see  how far you can get without help.
>  Do not think for a second you cannot do this math without Braille.  I
> made it through college without Braille because sorry but I have only
> been blind half of my 40 years and Braille hates me almost as much as I
> hate it.  Not to mention I took the math classes before I seriously got
> into Braille.
> 
> So if your let's say at Algebra II  level you could look for a course
> like algebra in a college then look at the books they are using.  You
> will be amazed at how many of them are actually recorded and being that
> math doesn't change that much you can pick old books or new it really
> doesn't matter just find one that explains things well.   I remember one
> of the Calculus books the reader would actually stop and correct errors
> in the books which I found amusing.
> 
> Ken
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org]
> On Behalf Of Stephen L Noble
> Sent: Wednesday, May 11, 2011 8:53 AM
> To: blindmath at nfbnet.org; tyler at tysdomain.com
> Subject: Re: [Blindmath] accessible online math resources
> 
> Design Science has a page which lists several online math courses built
> with MathML. I don't have enough familiarity with the sites to comment on
> other accessibility aspects of the sites mentioned (e.g., use of alt text
> on images, navigation intelligibility, etc.), but at least all the math
> equations will be accessible if you are using Internet Explorer with
> MathPlayer. Here's the page:
> http://www.dessci.com/en/reference/webmath/resources.htm 
> 
> Hope this helps,
> 
> --Steve Noble
> 
> >>> "Littlefield, Tyler" <tyler at tysdomain.com> 5/10/2011 1:38 AM >>>
> hello all:
> I have had some rather fragmented math between algebra and algebra2, not 
> to mention I haven't done much in it for a while. I took a refresher 
> course this year in college, but I have a question. I'm pretty good at 
> math, especially when I can read something and then work examples, and 
> check my answer, I have a friend who is willing to help out some, but he 
> can't teach me everything. So this leads me to a question; are there 
> resources out there for algebra, trig and calculous? I want to teach 
> myself what I don't know and just pass through what I can so I can test 
> out of some of these classes, as well as use the knowledge for other 
> projects. I have been into software development for a few years now, and 
> I have started looking into cryptography; as that is based entirely on 
> math, I want a good understanding of what I need as well as resources to 
> teach me what I don't know.
> 
> I have checked google a few different times. One of the first things I 
> remember looking into was vectors, and I have checked into this a few 
> times since. I want to get into audio game development, and I will need 
> vectors in order to coordenate movements through out the game world, as 
> well as define the position from which sounds are played. While I found 
> some useful information and some code to help me out, a lot of what I 
> found was pictures which rendered the information pretty much useless. 
> There weren't just pictures of the vectors, but often the formulas and 
> calculations themselves would be a picture with no alt-tag so that I can 
> read it with either a screen reader or a braille display.
> 
> Any information would be appreciated.
> 
> -- 
> 
> Take care,
> Ty
> my website:
> http://tds-solutions.net 
> my blog:
> http://tds-solutions.net/blog 
> skype: st8amnd127
> “Programmers are in a race with the Universe to create bigger and better idiot-proof programs, while the Universe is trying to create bigger and better
> idiots.  So far the Universe is winning.”
> “If Java had true garbage collection, most programs would delete themselves upon execution.”
> 
> 
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> 
> 
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----------------------------------- 
  Paul Wright
  Department of Mathematics
  University of Maryland
  http://www.math.umd.edu/~paulrite