[Blindmath] {Spam?} Re: Reintroducing myself and beta test opportunity for new STEM accessibility service.

Mon Feb 6 23:00:39 UTC 2017

Dear Daniel,

This is not directly related to your email to blindmath email group. I'm
a maths lecturer at Lancaster university (sighted). I was wondering if
you could tell me how do you learn advanced, university level, maths?

I'm preparing some accessible lecture notes for a visually impaired
student at my institution. She currently reads the lecture notes on a
very high zoom level, but I'd be very keen to hear from succesful maths
students how do they cope, in order to potentially improve our
approach.

Best,
Lukasz

On Mon, 6 Feb 2017 22:25:25 +0000
Dániel Hajas via Blindmath <blindmath at nfbnet.org> wrote:

> Hi Lucas, Zach,
> 
> Lucas, thanks for your quick introduction. I don’t see why you
> wouldn’t be able to help as an undergraduate, especially with the
> great qualifications and skills you have been gathering during your
> degree. In fact, I would be happy if you could help with trying out
> IRIS and letting the Grapheel team know if you think it would assist
> you during your science learning, and if not, how it could be changed
> to be more useful. It’s great you’ve done physics and chemistry. IRIS
> currently supports maths, physics, and to a lower extent biology and
> chemistry. However, in the near future, computer science and finances
> support should be added.
> 
> If you are happy to try IRIS, either let me know, or even better if
> you drop a line to contact at grapheel.com
> <mailto:contact at grapheel.com>, and I am sure the IRIS developers will
> get back to you soon with details.
> 
> You really don’t need to thank me for proposing the initiative, I
> simply encountered challenges that I believe still need solutions,
> and we try to create these solutions in the best way we can.
> 
> Zach, thanks for the enthusiastic reply, I’ll get back to you on that
> in a private message, to save the list members some irrelevant
> reading. If you don’t hear from me in the next 1-2 days, please send
> me a reminder in a private mail.
> 
> Best wishes,
> Daniel 
> 
> > On 6 Feb 2017, at 16:11, Lucas Nadolskis via Blindmath
> > <blindmath at nfbnet.org> wrote:
> > 
> > Hello Dr. Hajas.
> > 
> > I am currently a student of computer  science at the University of
> > Minnesota. I needed to take physics, and calculus   courses last
> > year and I am currently taking chemistry and linear algebra. I
> > encountered numerous issues either on the past and on the current
> > semester on accessibility on  this area of study.
> > 
> > So first I want to thank you for this idea of making the study of
> > science and engineering  more accessible for blind students. If you
> > think that me as a undergraduate student may help on the project I
> > would be extremely glade to help in any ways that i can.
> > 
> > Thank you again.
> > 
> > Best regards.
> > 
> > Lucas Nadolskis.
> > 
> >   
> >> On Feb 6, 2017, at 8:04 AM, Dániel Hajas via Blindmath
> >> <blindmath at nfbnet.org> wrote:
> >> 
> >> 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 a 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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> > 
> > 
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