[BlindMath] help with website name

Fri Jul 14 18:26:33 UTC 2017

As a former Leibniz scholar, I always associate the term "monad" with his metaphysical theories (see for example the Monadology).

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Lois Frankel, Ph.D.
Assessment Specialist IV, Assessment Development
Educational Testing Service
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lfrankel at ets.org

-----Original Message-----
From: BlindMath [mailto:blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Lukasz Grabowski via BlindMath
Sent: Friday, July 14, 2017 11:06 AM
To: blindmath at nfbnet.org
Cc: Łukasz Grabowski <graboluk at gmail.com>
Subject: [BlindMath] help with website name

Hi all,

I will soon be starting a (paid) webservice for visually impaired STEM students, whose initial aim will be providing interfaces to open-source software which are specifically designed for visually impaired people (in case you're interested what's the service about, I describe it briefly below, but it's an early stage).

I spent way too much time thinking about a name :-). For now I chose Blind Monad.

All the guides I read about choosing the domain name suggest to check with target demographics how they like it. So - do you like it? :-) It's somewhat inspired by the name of this group.

The word monad has many meanings but in the branch of maths called category theory monad is something which in particular describes interactions. Similarly in computer science monad is a concept which can be used for description of user interfaces, etc. A friend told me it's a bad name because noone will know what is a monad. I get the point but perhaps on the other hand it invokes your curiosity? :-)

Here are some very early details about the service. I came up with this idea after a recent private conversation with another group member Zach - it was clear that the problem he had, producing a diagram of a biochemical reaction, can be fairly easily solved by using open-source software. But the problem is having access to linux, configuring orca or other linux screen reader correctly, learning to interact with compilers, etc.

So the idea is that perhaps at first one could use a web-based front-end, and then if one thinks that it's a good idea, invest time and resources into configuring their own computer. The kind of things I want to provide access to are e.g. latex and latexml, python, octave (clone of matlab), DOT language for graphs, etc. plus "tailor-made"
interfaces if you want to solve some specific problem quickly. When I say "tailor-made" I really mean that the user would describe the way how they would prefer to interact with the website to solve a concrete problem (e.g. producing a diagram of a biochemical reaction), and then we work together to come up with an efficient interface.

In other words if you're a technically savvy person there's probably not much in the above which you couldn't do yourself.
Also the service will not be meant to "hook you", but rather introduce you to a technology in a most efficient fashion and encourage to explore it on your own (perhaps on your own computer). At a later stage I would perhaps also like to offer 1-1 "tutoring" in usage of latex, octave, etc. but will see where it goes.

Best,
Lukasz

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