[BlindMath] STEM in the 21st century

Tue Jan 12 05:08:22 UTC 2021

I concur!

-----Original Message-----
From: BlindMath <blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org> On Behalf Of Godfrey,
Jonathan via BlindMath
Sent: Monday, January 11, 2021 6:28 PM
To: Blind Math list for those interested in mathematics
<blindmath at nfbnet.org>
Cc: Godfrey, Jonathan <A.J.Godfrey at massey.ac.nz>
Subject: [BlindMath] STEM in the 21st century

Hello all,

This has turned out to be a lengthy opinion piece. I hope it provokes
responses, either on or off the list.

I've just read the thread on accessing equations in a pdf and use of LaTeX,
and decided not to contribute because my relevant points have been made by
others.

I guess I find myself quite frustrated that this discussion comes up
periodically and so little has changed, or at least the changes that have
been made have not led to the discussion becoming redundant.

A few tools have been developed since I joined this list over 12 years ago.
Access to math content in HTML is considerably better today courtesy of
MathML and MathJax and the ability of two screen readers to help. If I get
you to look at the archive, or wind your memories back, we were praising
Wikipedia for using the source LaTeX as the alt tag for its math content.
I'm confident most blind people new to reading wikipedia's math content
today wouldn't know how much better it is today than ten years ago.

Use of markdown as a viable alternative to full-blown LaTeX is another gain
for us, but I feel that it gets seen as a tool for geeks because it uses a
command line operation to get to the more desirable HTML (or pdf if you
must) final document. LaTeX is also seen as a geek's tool if we're  really
honest.

I used to use TeX4HT as my main tool for getting HTML from LaTeX source.
This was and probably still is, an excellent tool. How much traction does it
get though? Not much. Why? I don't know, but my current theory is that tools
that aren't right under people's noses or automatically applied in the
background just don't get as much traction.

I detest pdf as a format. I don't know if that bias can or ever will be
reduced or removed. Even the best developments in the last ten years haven't
yet given me the confidence to stop using HTML in favour of the most
accessible pdf on offer today. The work being done is really awesome and I
truly appreciate the efforts to improve pdf accessibility. I like that
people have put effort into getting better access to equations and graphics
in pdf files in particular. My discomfort starts when I see that the best
these efforts hope to achieve is what we already have in HTML documents.
This was not true ten years ago when HTML didn't offer us a solution.

So, what does a  pdf offer today that isn't on offer in HTML? Plenty of
things that relate to the way it looks when printed on a piece of paper and
sometimes on a screen. The width of the margins is of next to zero
importance to me, after all,  I read the words not the white space.

My major issue is that the ongoing use of pdf and everything about the dead
tree model to assessment, especially in examination situations, is that the
way we ask questions is being constrained by the tools we use. For years,
I've wanted to use a digital exam process for my students. The barriers to
this have been numerous, but mostly they come down to the inability to get
people to change. Simple solution: change people by walking away from
intransigent individuals and wait for an enlightened person to come along
next year. That is, don't expect a person to change, switch person instead.

Then, along comes a global pandemic. Wow, do people want to change the way
they do things so that we retain students and therefore academic jobs.
Suddenly, the things I've wanted to introduce or have introduced by stealth
are what many others now want too. OK, you might think to start popping the
champagne, clapping hands (only your own), and singing happy songs. No
sorry, don't get too excited. Little actually changed.

The pragmatic solution for many of my colleagues was 20th century thinking.
Let's produce a pdf exam, upload it onto our 21st century teaching platform,
and get students to print it, write on it, and upload their work by taking
photos of it.

Other colleagues took the plunge and made decent online exams with students
answering questions by typing into the boxes on the web page. This is what
we did in my department as it happens, but the mathematicians along the
corridor could not manage this because their students couldn't type up their
work. In part this is because of the questions being asked. For example, in
a pen and paper world, a common question is, "Invert the following 3x3
matrix." But what does it actually achieve? In 2020, with students doing
their exams without supervision, there was nothing stopping a student from
checking their answer using software. (I'd encourage it as it happens).

At what point though do we decide to stop asking questions that are only
ever asked in an exam context? I really would not expect a graduate of a
21st century math degree to ever do a matrix inversion outside an exam
except to prove that it can be done. Why? Because we have software. When do
we say that is OK to use software in an exam and alter our questions
accordingly? Say, moving to a 4x4 matrix and asking to prove that the
solution is valid?

In my own field of statistics, the work we are doing is starting to affect
our teaching, and therefore how we examine our students. Our online exam
environment couldn't accept a picture being pasted into the dialogue box,
but it did accept the code used to generate a graph. As it happens, this was
brilliant for me because I was able to download all exam submissions as a
single text file. I did more independent marking in 2020 than I did in the
previous ten years.

I believe the changes being forced on our education systems by a pandemic
are a massive opportunity to see things change for the better. I think the
colleagues who had to deal with piles of student photographs will learn they
did it the hard way and want to modernise. Even the mathematicians I work
alongside will have to change.

I therefore conclude with a prediction. Life in STEM as a blind person is
getting better. I suggest though, that it is not getting easier. I firmly
believe that even the most experienced among us will need to be learning new
tricks at a faster rate than we have been in the past. Our survival depends
on it. For me, that means not wasting time on fighting with pdf files,
software that doesn't work, and people that insist I do either. In that
respect, 2020 was a good year for me.

Jonathan

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