[BlindMath] A Project to Help New Students

[Lilian Joy]

Hi Jimmy
Thank you for starting such a project.
We have a group of University people discussing the kind of thing that you
are working on. The group is called the Jisc Accessible Maths working
group. Our Github site is A11ymaths <https://github.com/A11yMaths>. The
site lists many resources by various universities. One notable site would
be the Making STEM and Maths accessible website
<https://www.makethingsaccessible.com/guides/accessible-stemm-introduction/>,
created by UCL, Westminster, the Pocklington Trust and many other
universities. You can contact them directly from their website if you wish
to contribute to their site. I think having a page that targets blind
students is ideal and an improvement on their current navigation.
If you would like to join our Jisc group, our next meeting is on 8th
November and you can email me your email address to be added (
lilian.joy at york.ac.uk).

My feedback on your website would be to make the hyperlinks descriptive.
There are a lot of links on the page that say 'here' and that is one of the
baseline things on digital accessibility that is important to get right.
I take Jonathan Fine's points about ensuring things stay up to date, and
this is partly why a joint effort across multiple organisations is
important. Ensuring we have student input is also very important, and as
Jonathan says, the internet is ripe with many older versions of advice that
1. may be out of date, 2. is not always helpful for students if they want
to make it into higher education.

My own experience is that you sometimes have to work with what a blind
student is familiar with, but also spend time to update their skills. You
may need to ensure they are using an up-to-date browser, for instance, or
coach them to use mathjax on web pages.
Ideally, there would be stories by blind or VI student
<https://www.makethingsaccessible.com/aaa/stories/niamh/>s explaining how
they use the technology. I think it's a good idea to capture more stories.
I wrote one with one blind student, her transcriber and her tutor: An
accessible maths journey - pre-publication version
<https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ZHAUcx3w8C0alSh2fsR9p7pIbWP7HXCg/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=100066060327502209934&rtpof=true&sd=true>
.

I hope to learn much more from this group and to continue expanding what we
are doing.
Regards
*Lilian*

Lilian Joy
Digital Education Adviser

Tel: 01904 321177
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