[Blindmath] Reintroducing myself and beta test opportunity for new STEM accessibility service.

Mon Feb 6 16:09:23 UTC 2017

Apologies to all whom the previous message was not intended for. 

Zachary Mason
M.S. Student
Animal and Dairy Sciences
Mississippi State University

-----Original Message-----
From: Zach [mailto:zm290 at msstate.edu] 
Sent: Monday, February 06, 2017 10:01 AM
To: 'Blind Math list for those interested in mathematics' <blindmath at nfbnet.org>
Subject: RE: [Blindmath] Reintroducing myself and beta test opportunity for new STEM accessibility service.

Dear Dr. Hajas, 

To be succinct, I've been contemplating building a similar service in the U.S. Could we schedule a time to talk about the skills set desired of future Grapheel initiative employees?  I am very interested in work opportunities in this field, and believe my experience in graduate education and accessible technology make me a valuable asset to such an organization as the Grapheel initiative. Attached is a recent CV. 

Sincerely,

Zachary Mason
M.S. Student
Animal and Dairy Sciences
Mississippi State University

-----Original Message-----
From: Blindmath [mailto:blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Dániel Hajas via Blindmath
Sent: Monday, February 06, 2017 8:05 AM
To: blindmath at nfbnet.org
Cc: Dániel Hajas <d.hajas.lists at gmail.com>
Subject: [Blindmath] Reintroducing myself and beta test opportunity for new STEM accessibility service.

Dear All,

Let me reintroduce myself, as probably the memory of my person faded on this list, since I have to confess, I haven’t been posting or regularly reading the conversation going on between the BlindMath list members, even though I am signed up for a number of years and always found the knowledge exchange of the list very valuable, supportive and a friendly place. Personal and work related pressure prevented me from participating in this community in the past year, year and a half, which I wish to change now and catch up with all the unread e-mails, contribute with anything I can to new topics. As part of my reintroduction, please also allow me to bring your attention to a new STEM accessibility service. You can read more about it as well, and if you wish to participate and help shaping the service  with your feedback and insights, please let the developer team or myself know about it.

Now to the point:

I am Daniel Hajas, a blind theoretical physicist at the University of Sussex, England; and founder of Grapheel, (www.grapheel.com) which is an initiative to enhance accessibility of science education for people with special needs, using a set of online services, hardware products and public engagement activities, partnering with other organisations to make scientific content more accessible.

As part of the Grapheel initiative, me and a small team are designing an online, science community based image description service (called IRIS) to enhance the study experience of blind and visually impaired students in their education. Initially we would like to focus on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) education, but later expand to subjects at arts and humanities and support image descriptions of financial graphs, or wave form visualisations in music editing. 

As we are at a very early stage of development, we would highly appreciate insights and feedback from the blind community familiar with accessibility considerations and state-of-the-art products and services. In particular, I would be grateful if  members of  this community could test and advise us on how to improve the service (please read more about it below). We have a feature incomplete test version, which we run in closed beta but before adding newer and new features we believe could be useful, we wish to start engaging with experienced, early adapter users, such that we can essentially build IRIS together from ground up.

The service is very similar to initiatives such as, Be my eyes, Bespecular, TapTapSee and other; however, our service aims to focus specifically on educational needs, with a pool of volunteering experts at given academic disciplines.

How does IRIS work?
• blind or visually impaired (BVI) students upload an image of scientific content, graphs, diagrams.
• BVI students select a field of study (tag) e.g. physics, maths, chemistry etc. and a level of difficulty.
• BVI students can ask a specific question they would like to know about the figure.
• A pool of sighted volunteers with the necessary knowledge are assigned to groups of chosen disciplines based on their user settings of competency.
• When an image request is sent by a BVI student, the figure appears in a queue that all volunteers of a specific discipline can view and describe.
• If a request is accepted, the volunteer should give a description of the image based on provided guidelines.
• The recipient of the description can either accept the response, or ask for further clarification.

What will I need to do as a tester?
All you need to do is to log in whenever you can, upload a figure of scientific content, wait for the description and let us know what are the things you like, don’t like and suggest us new features you believe would be useful or could be done in a better way.

If you feel you would be happy and able to help us, please let us know by getting in touch on contact at grapheel.com. Then we will send you a URL to access the service, your username, password and a “How to get started” instruction. 

Best wishes,
Daniel 
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