[BlindMath] Accessibility for Stats courses

[George Bell]

Hi Sarah,

To answer your last question first, take a peek here:
http://www.dessci.com/en/products/MathType/features.htm#handmath

Design Science, who are quite a small company, are wonderful people to work with.  Some of the main features of MathType are:

1) Works inside Word and many other applications.
2) It is very easy then to produce Large Print math.
3) Simple to open the Word file in Duxbury (especially with Duxbury's free SWIFT Word add-on) to obtain braille.
4) A variety of MathType "Convert" functions allow you for example to copy an equation, leave the first as is, and Convert the copied one say to LaTeX.
5) You can also do the reverse.

All in all, for the cost, MathType is an excellent piece of software and used quite extensively over here in the UK.

And it is thanks to all this that in some 3rd world countries, where math has never been taught to braille reading students, it is now beginning to appear on the curriculum.

George

-----Original Message-----
From: BlindMath [mailto:blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Sarah Jevnikar via BlindMath
Sent: 08 September 2017 18:19
To: 'Blind Math list for those interested in mathematics'
Cc: Sarah Jevnikar; 'Sweeney, Hope'
Subject: Re: [BlindMath] Accessibility for Stats courses

Hi there,
It looks like you've done lots of good research here; your students are lucky to have you. :)

Are all your students Braille readers and writers? What screen reading (if any) tools do they typically use?

Instructor slides can be a challenge, but if they use LaTeX, this can be translated into Braille using Duxbury, or spoken math using Math Type, Math player, Microsoft Word, and NVDA. I'm not sure how well this works with JAWS. This will not, of course, fix the problem of instructors not reading what they're writing on the board; that is still a matter of persuasion.

When you say accessible format for textbooks, what do you mean? I've had great success with Nemeth code texts (either as electronic Braille in .brf format or in hard-copy Braille) but mixed results with math ml files (in .xml format) when opened in Firefox with NVDA and Math Player. When the files would open, the math was spoken well but did not always appear on a Braille display.

I remember R working well (I've recently been using Stata) but your students should get used to using command lines and text logs of their output.

Learning LaTeX on their part will go a long way to making their math output easier for sighted instructors and graders to read. There are good pieces of software (Nemetex and Duxbury) that translate Braille math to print, but both only use Nemeth rather than UEB math and the latter (Duxbury) is still experimental.

What do you mean by Math Type working with handwriting? I've never come across this before and am intrigued.

I hope this is somewhat helpful

Sarah Jevnikar
BA Economics and International Relations 2017

-----Original Message-----
From: BlindMath [mailto:blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Sweeney, Hope via BlindMath
Sent: September 8, 2017 9:49 AM
To: blindmath at nfbnet.org
Cc: Sweeney, Hope
Subject: [BlindMath] Accessibility for Stats courses

Good Morning,
I am currently working with several students taking undergrad and grad level statistics courses.  We've sent the books to a third party vendor for accessible format but are working to ensure accessibility in day to day classes and other materials for the classes.  R and RStudio are being used- we are attempting to work with Braille R but I have nothing conclusive there yet.  As far as day to day class time, I found information on MathType being able to work with hand written equations and an App called IDEALMath that works the same.  I am hoping someone has a process they utilize that works well to ensure complete accessibility.  What absolutely hasn't worked so you've scrapped and/or had faculty scrap?

Regards,
Hope Sweeney

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