[Blindmath] Use of the SVGDraw01 drawing program in STEM courses

[Richard Baldwin]

This message is intended mainly for teachers of blind or visually impaired
students in STEM courses. Of course, this is a public forum and everyone is
welcome to read the message and provide comments as appropriate.

Having been the sighted teacher of a blind student for several years, I
firmly believe that making it possible for blind and visually impaired
people, and particularly blind and visually impaired students in STEM
courses, to communicate using accurate printed and tactile graphics will
improve the quality of life and the likelihood of academic success for those
students.

I have written a computer program that makes it possible, for the first time
in history, for blind and visually impaired people to create such graphics
in an accessible and user-friendly way.

Version 0.0.8 of my drawing program for blind students is now posted and
available for free and immediate download at:

http://www.austincc.edu/baldwin/SWT-SVG/SVGDraw01.zip

Three components are necessary to accomplish the goal of widespread graphics
communication among blind and visually impaired students and their teachers:

   - Availability of a robust and universally accepted graphics standard.
   - Availability of a robust, accessible, and user-friendly drawing program
   that allows blind people to take advantage of the SVG standard.
   - Availability of high-quality, economical, and readily available
   graphics embossing equipment.

A robust graphics standard - SVG

A robust and universally accepted graphics standard is already available in
the form of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). See Scalable Vector Graphics
(SVG) 1.1 (Second Edition) <http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/>
An accessible and user-friendly drawing program - SVGDraw01

I have written and provided, free of charge, a drawing program that blind
and visually impaired people can use to draw pictures. To the best of my
knowledge, no other existing program provides that capability. (If such a
program exists, it is a well-kept secret.) Thus, for the first time in
history, your students can express themselves using graphics.

While many drawing programs exist, they are written for use by sighted
people and not for use by blind people. My program is designed and written
specifically for use by blind and visually impaired people.

Even though my program is still under development, it already provides the
capability for STEM students to create graphics that mirror many of the
figures and diagrams typically found in STEM textbooks.
A graph board on steroids

As a teacher of blind or visually impaired students, you might think of this
program as bringing the old-fashioned graph board into the computer age.
Students and others using this program can create both printed and tactile
graphics using many of the same thought processes that they would use when
constructing a "drawing" on a graph board using pushpins, rubber bands, a
protractor, and a measuring stick.

For example, one student might use this program to create and send an SVG
file to a friend with the message "Take a look at the cool floor plan of my
new apartment."

Another student might use this program to create and send an SVG file to a
college professor with the message "This is a free body diagram showing the
magnitude and directions of forces F21 and F23 caused by the interactions
among charges q1, q2, and q3."
Getting an immediate visual output

I will be adding new capabilities over time. However, I probably won't add
capabilities that would not be useful to blind and visually impaired users.
For example, the program does not, by default, produce an immediate visual
output. The primary output is intended to be a printer, a graphics embosser,
or both. But, if you are sighted, or if you are blind and using the vOICe
sonification software to view the progress of your drawing, you can use a
procedure described in the attached file to view your drawing as it
progresses.
 High-quality, economical, and readily-available graphics embossing
equipment

This is the area where we fall short relative to achieving our widespread
graphics communications goal. Although high-quality embossing equipment is
available in the marketplace, it is not economical (by computer standards)
nor is it readily available for the personal use of most blind students.

I view this as a supply and demand problem. Prior to the release of my
program, there were no robust, accessible, and user-friendly tools that made
it possible for blind people to create  accurate graphics for use with a
high-quality embosser. Thus, the demand for such embossing equipment has
been very limited. My hope is that by making it possible for all blind
people to create accurate graphics, the demand for such embossing equipment
will go up and the costs for the equipment will come down.

Even today, however, many schools, colleges, and other organizations own
high-quality graphics embossing equipment that they can make available to
their blind and visually impaired clientele on some basis. In those cases,
there is no reason for blind people to hold back from learning to
communicate using graphics.

My drawing program is freely available for you and your students to use. As
a teacher, it is up to you to connect your blind and visually impaired
students to those available hardware embossing resources.

The attached HTML file is the User-Instruction file for my drawing program
named SVGDraw01.

Richard Baldwin
Professor of Computer Information Technology
Austin Community College
baldwin at austincc.edu
http://www.austincc.edu/baldwin/
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