[BlindMath] Transitioning from Completely Visual Math to Less Visual Math

[Doug and Molly Miron]

Good day Nicholas,

I've been learning to deal with this issue myself since I went from 
hard-of-seeing to totally useless sight about two years ago.  You are 
correct that hard copy braille books take a lot of space.  There are 
multi-line braille displays, see the American Printing House for the Blind 
and National Federation for the Blind to see what they have to offer.  I 
personally am using LaTeX in Word with MathType and MathPlayer to render 
research papers into readable form.  There are allegedly converters from 
LaTeX to MathML, but, so far, I haven't been able to make one work.  .pdf 
files are useless for equations and figures.  Some people on this list have 
been able to get the LaTeX files for books from the authors and that has 
apparently been useful.  APHB has been working on a tactile graphics display 
which may be available later this year.

If you are located in the U.D. you probably have a State Services for the 
Blind available.  Getting them or a national source to braille your books is 
probably the most reliable route.  There are other blind students, which I 
am not, on this list who can tell you more about this process.  High tech is 
almost there, but not quite yet.

Regards,
Doug Miron


-----Original Message----- 
From: Nicholas J via BlindMath
Sent: Thursday, March 30, 2017 6:01 PM
To: blindmath at nfbnet.org
Cc: Nicholas J
Subject: Re: [BlindMath] Transitioning from Completely Visual Math to Less 
Visual Math

Thank you for the email about the textbooks Łukasz. Many of the braille
displays I have seen only show one line of a book or text. Are there any
that show multiple lines? If the textbook is a pdf, will the screen reader
be able to read the math notation? If the math notation is not in mathml,
is it easy to make it in mathml?

Thank you,
Nicholas

On Tue, Mar 28, 2017 at 11:21 PM, Nicholas J <314nick15 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I’m considering doing a Master’s in statistics, but I do not want to go
> back to the technology that I used before. I used a cctv to view the board
> and zoomtext as a screen magnifier. All the cctvs I have used have still
> left me not able to see what was happening in most of my classes before 
> and
> zoomtext made things slower for me because of so much magnification. Right
> now I am transitioning to using Jaws for the computer, but I am not sure
> what to do for things like the boards in classes, writing, and things like
> that. I don’t write notes because I am slow at it since I have to write 
> big
> and I usually still can’t understand what I wrote because of how quickly I
> wrote it and how unreadable it is. I have been looking at doing things in
> braille, but am not sure if that is the best way to go. I thought it might
> take a lot of time also to learn it. I still think it may be helpful in
> some situations (maybe graphics which I could almost never discern
> correctly the more complicated they got). I have been reading through all
> the posts here about latex and having Jaws read them and other kinds of
> technologies, but I am not sure what kinds of technology are best for the
> transition of doing everything visually to doing things less visually. My
> vision has always stayed the same, but the field I am working in is
> statistics and it gets very small and specific for notation and 
> everything.
> Main Question: What technology and how can I do math more electronically
> and less visually? I am learning Jaws, braille, and Kurzweil.
>
>
> Thank you,
>
> Nicholas
>
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