[Blindmath] University Math

[Michael Whapples]

Based upon that then yes LaTeX or MathType are probably going to be very useful to you. There are some other accessible math authoring systems, however I think these probably are not up to the same standard as either LaTeX or MathType. Should you want to look at some, then two which come to mind are the LAMBDA project and CattyInfty.

As MathType you would be entering equations using the LaTeX notation, it probably is a good idea for you to find a good LaTeX tutorial/reference book. As I said one I have found quite good is the LaTeX wikibook at http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX. If learning it for MathType then only learn about what is relevant for the math mode of LaTeX as that is all you would use in MathType. If using standard LaTeX then the rest will be useful (depending on what you need to do). Normally there are packages in LaTeX for most things, eg. packages for showing computer code, packages for creating slide presentations (alternative to powerpoint), graphics drawing packages and more specialist packages for specific topics (I believe there is a package for creating diagrams of molecules). Also if writing LaTeX you may want to find a good LaTeX editor, Texnic centre has been said to be accessible, others (particularly Linux users) like editors such as emacs.

As for reading, yes you could ask for materials to be given to you in either MathType or LaTeX form, however this could very well not be optimal. As an example, due to LaTeX allowing one to define macros, an author may use many custom macros so you will find lots of non-standard commands which will mean you will need to spend time on understanding what is written rather than what the document is trying to convey.

What would I say is the optimal reading format? Well personally I find Braille very good in that respect, however you have voiced not wanting to have it all in Braille and also regardless of whether a university has a legal obligation to provide documents in a format of your choice, Braille translation can be imperfect or slow to appear.

One option is using the MathPlayer plugin for Internet Explorer from Design Science, which will enable a screen reader to speak maths. It possibly could do with some improvement in allowing navigating the equation, but I understand that would need work from the screen reader provider, so if you want to see that happen may be indicate to them that math support is valuable to you and any screen reader which offers that will have a big preference over others when you need to buy a screen reader.

It is worth noting that documents created using MathType can be exported to a web page suitable for reading with MathPlayer. Also a LaTeX document can be converted to a suitable web page for reading with MathPlayer (look at the tex4ht package for LaTeX), however the conversion I think does not give quite as good results as MathType.

I believe the ideal math reading solution is still to be implemented.

Learning a little LaTeX can be useful, as some websites have the equation shown in an image and have the alt-tag set to be the LaTeX of the equation.

You will probably find you will need to use a combination of techniques in the end, course notes can be produced in a specific format but if you are going to read publications then you may not be able to get what you ideally need.

As for producing graphics, if using LaTeX there probably is a package for the diagram type. If not using LaTeX, there are plenty of other packages, GnuPlot is one general package, but depending on where the data is coming from you may not need something else (eg. if using matlab that can do plots, then one can also use things like excel).

Are there other specific tools you want to know about?

Michael Whapples
On 28 Apr 2013, at 20:07, Kartik Sawhney <sawhney.kartik at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> @Susan: While I know reading braille, I've not used it much for
> academics. I haven't tried Math and Science using braille. I generally
> write programs in C++ (using Dev as the compiler). While I can read
> labels accompanying the diagram/graphic (which will be in braille), I
> do not intend using it for rest of the text.
> @Michael: I know braille, but am not a proficient reader. I would like
> to use a computer for all my work as far as possible.
> 
> Best,
> -- 
> -Kartik Sawhney,
> Mob.: 91-9560953728
> Landline: 91-11-29811529
> E-mail ID: sawhney.kartik at gmail.com (all personal E-mails);
> kartiks2 at stanford.edu (all academic E-mails)
> Skype: kartik.sawhney22
> 
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