[Blindmath] MATLAB Accessibility

[Jonathan Godfrey]

Hi Justin et al.,

I've just finished teaching an introductory statistics module to second year
engineering students. In the other 2/3 of that paper, the students use
MATLAB which is the sensible option as it has the necessary functionality to
deal with the differential equations etc. that they cover.

The staff received a question from a student via a liaison committee and we
needed to justify use of R in the statistics module. As you can imagine I
found this quite easy. The plain and simple answer is that MATLAB is not
statistical software. Sure it does do some basic statistics work, but so
does Excel for example. If it is effective and efficient creation of
statistical analyses that are required, then use of dedicated statistical
software  is the solution. The features offered via an add-on statistical
toolbox for MATLAB may still leave you (and any other PhD student doing
statistics as part of their work) without the tools you need.

Accessibility of MATLAB is something we should know about as a community,
but if you were wanting to cover the options for a blind student needing to
perform statistical analyses, I think you should be covering something like
Minitab or SPSS instead.

MATLAB users outside the mathematical sciences and engineering are rare
people. If you know of any, I would ask them why they are MATLAB users. Make
sure they use it because their application area of interest makes good use
of the functionality MATLAB is good at, rather than because it is a tool
they learnt while at college or graduate school. I know plenty of SAS users
that teach their students SAS because it is all they know how to use
themselves. I advise their students to use the tool that does the job the
best (effective and efficient). Sometimes that is R, sometimes it is
Minitab/SPSS, and (heaven forbid) sometimes the job can be done in Excel.
MATLAB just doesn't come close to being a useful solution for the sighted
people I advise, so I wouldn't start to consider it for a blind person.

See http://r-resources.massey.ac.nz for some commentary on access to
statistical software for blind users if you haven't already. If you feel
there is more worth adding to this resource then please pass it on to me.
Also note the access to science webpages set up by John Gardner that might
be a useful place to put your final power point presentation in order to
spread the word.

Cheers,
Jonathan







-----Original Message-----
From: Blindmath [mailto:blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Justin
Salisbury
Sent: Friday, 12 April 2013 10:41 a.m.
To: blindmath at nfbnet.org; nfb-science at nfbnet.org
Subject: [Blindmath] MATLAB Accessibility

Dear List,
                I am a student at the Louisiana Center for the Blind, and I
am going to be entering a PhD program in Agricultural & Applied Economics in
the fall.  I I am doing a project right now where I am evaluating three
statistical packages and their accessibility: MatLab, SAS, and R.  I have
found a good bit of accessibility information for R and SAS, and I am trying
to obtain all three of them.
                The reason that I am writing to this list is to ask if
anyone knows where I can find accessibility reviews for MatLab.  Does
anyone?  If not, what information can you give me from your own experience?
                This information that I collect will ultimately go into a
PowerPoint presentation comparing these three packages.

Thank you in advance.

Justin Salisbury


Justin M. Salisbury
B.A. in Mathematics
Class of 2012
East Carolina University
president at alumni.ecu.edu<mailto:president at alumni.ecu.edu>

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change
the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."    -MARGARET MEAD


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