[BlindMath] Math Speak

Tue Sep 8 21:41:29 UTC 2020

Hi,

Thanks Neil for the added information. I think it is important to remember that Dr Nemeth worked in a pre-computational era in mathematics. At that time, any statistics courses that existed were mathematical in nature. We're very definitely a comfortable distance from those times... 

The question arose from a need to teach statistics. I suggest that there might therefore be some benefit in all parties (student, teacher, and support staff) reading a paper Theodor Loots and I wrote five years ago for the Journal of Statistics Education, entitled "Advice from blind teachers on how to teach statistics to blind students"

A quite readable pre-print version exists at
https://r-resources.massey.ac.nz/papers/JSE.v23.n3/

While it was written over five years ago, I haven't found anything in there that I would write much differently today.

In contrast, I've recently looked at a conference paper I delivered in Japan back in late 2009, and can only reflect that the period of greatest change in my lifetime in university education of statistics must have occurred in the period from about 2008 to 2014.

Jonathan

-----Original Message-----
From: BlindMath <blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org> On Behalf Of Neil Soiffer via BlindMath
Sent: Wednesday, 9 September 2020 8:29 AM
To: Blind Math list for those interested in mathematics <blindmath at nfbnet.org>
Cc: Neil Soiffer <soiffer at alum.mit.edu>; Anderson, Mary Fran <MaryFran.Anderson at wesd.org>
Subject: Re: [BlindMath] Math Speak

A little more info to add to what Bob said...

MathSpeak was developed by Dr. Nemeth so that he could communicate math well with his assistants. In its pure form, it has a one-to-one correspondence with the braille code for math that he developed and is named after him: Nemeth code. You can find some more details at the seewritehear website <https://www.seewritehear.com/accessible-mathml/mathspeak/examples/NemethBook/>.
Because MathSpeak does not speak math the way it is normally spoken in the classroom in many cases (e.g., "x superscript 2 baseline plus 1" vs "x squared plus 1"), GH (now seewritehear) has options to add semantic interpretation along with verbosity options.

If the student is proficient in Nemeth Code (which he should be), MathSpeak might be a reasonable option. I'm not an expert in Nemeth code, but I'll go out on a limb and say that a general guideline for the teacher is that he/she should explicitly name any greek letter and make sure the beginning and ending of any 2D notation is obvious when speaking it. When doing that, you won't be too far off from what MathSpeak says (exceptions would be for nested radicals, fractions, powers, and superscripts, but those are complicated to understand by just speech in any case). E.g, "fraction 1 over n end fraction"; "chi squared" is fine; "x bar" is ok after (probably a few times) saying that "x bar" is written as "x with a line above it".

Neil Soiffer

On Tue, Sep 8, 2020 at 12:57 PM Bob Mathews via BlindMath < blindmath at nfbnet.org> wrote:

> Hello Mary,
>
> MathSpeak is one of the 3 speech styles of MathPlayer, the free math 
> speech plugin from Wiris. MathSpeak is described in the MathPlayer User Manual:
> https://docs.wiris.com/en/mathplayer/start. If you don't have 
> MathPlayer yet, there's a download link to MathPlayer 4 in the manual.
>
> It could be you were thinking of ClearSpeak. This was a joint project 
> between the Educational Testing Service (ETS) and Design Science (now 
> Wiris), under a US Department of Education Grant. You can find out 
> more about ClearSpeak from its documentation:
>
> https://docs.wiris.com/en/mathtype/mathtype_desktop/accessibility/clea
> rspeak
> .
>
> Regards,
> Bob Mathews
> Wiris
>
> On Tue, Sep 8, 2020 at 2:34 PM Anderson, Mary Fran via BlindMath < 
> blindmath at nfbnet.org> wrote:
>
> > Dear Blindmath,
> >
> > I am working with a blind student enrolled in statistics. I am 
> > trying to help her teacher describe the statistics problems in a way 
> > that my
> student
> > can understand. I have heard of something called math speak, but I
> haven’t
> > been able to find any information regarding this. Can anyone help 
> > with
> this
> > issue?
> > Thank you.
> > Mary Fran Anderson
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>
> --
>
> MathType 7 is out! Check the new version at wiris.com/mathtype 
> <http://www.wiris.com/mathtype?utm_source=emailfooter>
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