[BlindMath] STEM in the 21st century

Thu Jan 21 14:58:37 UTC 2021

Hi Jonathan G

Thank you for sharing your experience and hopes in your message. You've
given us a lot to think about. I've written a blog post on your
contribution, and some other threads on this list. This will I think help
LaTeX developers be aware of the blind math experience.
https://jfine2358.github.io/post/2021/01/21/blind-math-news/

My main conclusion as a TeX developer is that many on this list prefer
accessible HTML to accessible PDF. I hope that's a fair statement.

By the way, I hold an online TeX Office Hour every Thursday 6:30 to 7:30pm
UK time. All are welcome. Here's the zoom details

https://us04web.zoom.us/j/78551255396?pwd=cHdJN0pTTXRlRCtSd1lCTHpuWmNIUT09
Meeting ID: 785 5125 5396
Passcode: knuth

with best regards

Jonathan F

On Mon, Jan 11, 2021 at 11:29 PM Godfrey, Jonathan via BlindMath <
blindmath at nfbnet.org> wrote:

> 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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