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

Tue Feb 7 11:07:26 UTC 2017

Dear Lukasz,

Excellent question. This is a topic that can not be fully explored within an e-mail but let me perhaps give a few key points that worked for me:
• First and foremost, let’s establish that screen magnification and screen reading have very different requirements, which of course can often complement each other.
• For writing, reading and editing mathematical content, let it be lecture notes, assessments and so on, I believe it is inevitable to be familiar the LaTeX markup language, and for screen reading purposes use for instance the LaTeX Access Project under Windows, which I am most people from this list are familiar with. It is good practise to provide lecture notes in LaTeX for this reason, which I know some UK Maths and Physics departments do.
• I think it is also very important to have a basic understanding of how for instance JAWS for Windows and Voice Over can read MathML content, or other screen readers using products like MathPlayer by Design Science; and be aware of online resources such as, DLMF (Digital Library of Mathematical Functions) developed by NIST, which provide high-level content both in LaTeX and MathML formats.
• Finding accessible mathematics books is a different chapter, often very difficult. Approaching authors, perhaps instead of publishers might speed up and increase chances of finding alternative formats of eBooks such as, LaTeX or XML instead of PDF. Daisy with MathML is an option, but I haven’t seen many examples for that yet.
• It is good practise to have a high-standard calculator, e.g. the APH + Orbit Research developed Orion Texas Instrument audio-graphing display calculator. Equally, it is important to do these sort of computations or graph sketching on non GUI programmes, such as Python. The audio graphing calculator or alternative sonification software such as the vOICe can help students visualise the shape and trends of curves, functions, limits. While using Python or other interpreted languages enable students to sketch their own graphs fairly easily and have higher control over the output, than for instance Ms Excel, which on occasions might be a little inconvenient for this purpose.
• Tactile Graphics embossers such as View+ Technologies provides can also help in the students understanding of graphs; however, this is something that needs practise and a fair amount of time to learn to use.
• Obviously, not only the technical but the human support element is also rather relevant to be successful as a vision impaired maths or STEM student. Standards such as extra time for exams, assessments, additional office hours or someone who can help with taking notes from the blackboard if appropriate and necessary. We can not ignore the fact, that no matter how fluent someone is in using any of the above technical solutions, it will always take longer to view, or read, write a markup language, a graph etc.

There are additional software solutions and accessibility concerns for instance with regards to the Infty Project to OCR mathematical documents in order to access further resources, or the often quoted accessibility questions around mathematical software such as MatLab, Wolfram Mathematica  etc. How efficient these technologies are always a question one needs to evaluate.

As I said this is just scraping the top of the ice-mountain, and there are many details, other options; but I hope this is a good overview for a starter and can trigger some further questions, conversations.  The above are my practises, experiences from the few years of being a blind scientist and I am sure, as many students, teachers, educators, support workers there are concerned in this field, there are just as many, slightly different ways of approaching the same challenge.

Daniel 
> On 6 Feb 2017, at 23:00, Łukasz Grabowski via Blindmath <blindmath at nfbnet.org> wrote:
> 
> 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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>> 
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> 
> 
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