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

Tue Feb 7 22:44:33 UTC 2017

Hi Daniel:

I just read your e-mails on the blind math list. I am myself a blind phd in 
theoretical physics, and am therefore very much interested in your idea on 
making diagrams accessible.

I will soon be signing up as a beta tester, but it would also be interesting 
to touch base and share some notes on how to do physics as a blind person 
some time. One thing I have often felt the need for is clarification of some 
formulae. Say I am reading some physics material, which was originally in an 
inaccessible format. I run infty reader to OCR it and get a LaTeX version. 
The accuracy of OCR is reasonably good, but from time to time I encounter an 
equation which has not been recognized correctly, and I can tell that 
something is not right.
In such a situation, it would be nice to be able to ask a sighted person 
just to read the equation out to me or give me a correct version in a format 
like LaTex. Such a clarification of 1 or 2 equations will typically not take 
than a diagram, and I was therefore thinking that it could easily be added 
to the service you are working on offering.

Aqil

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Dániel Hajas via Blindmath" <blindmath at nfbnet.org>
To: <blindmath at nfbnet.org>
Cc: "Dániel Hajas" <d.hajas.lists at gmail.com>
Sent: Monday, February 06, 2017 9:04 AM
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 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
> _______________________________________________
> Blindmath mailing list
> Blindmath at nfbnet.org
> http://nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/blindmath_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> Blindmath:
> http://nfbnet.org/mailman/options/blindmath_nfbnet.org/aqilsajjad%40gmail.com
> BlindMath Gems can be found at 
> <http://www.blindscience.org/blindmath-gems-home>
> 