[BlindMath] A Project to Help New Students

Tue Oct 31 21:10:57 UTC 2023

Hello,

Two things come to mind whenever I see such projects being launched, and this is really not my first rodeo.

They are Scope/Completeness and Currency

The internet is full of brilliant suggestions that are now stale. I don't know how many times I have had to explain to people that an initiative sounds awesome but hasn't been supported for x years. I firmly believe that active monitoring is required if anyone presenting expert advice is to avoid sending people on wild goose chases. I am totally comfortable making claims about the usefulness of R because I use it almost every day. I don't update all of my expert advice pages with new version numbers, but I do make sure my readers know which version I was using and when. I also do not claim something works unless I have actually used it myself. That means making sure any information I get from others, names those people and the date I received the information.

With respect to currency, you might look at how you describe MathPlayer and seek advice on its future, as well as its successor(s).

Personally, if you can't demonstrate a blind person using a tool happily in the last three to five years, then don't suggest it to other blind people.

Turning to completeness/scope:

I think it  is important to know what boundaries you set for the project. What will you do? And more importantly, what you are not doing. If the assistance is geared towards supporting students through the first year mathematics courses at a particular university, then the requirements of their courses are a sensible rationale for what you ought to include/exclude.

You also have an expert at the University of Birmingham in accessibility. His links with MathJax are thoroughly established, yet you haven't mentioned mathjax much if at all yet.

My own personal take on what is not mentioned sufficiently yet includes:
- mathematical software, not all of which is accessible.
- access to tables of derivatives/integrals (yes I remember first year calculus) and other formulae provided to students.
- the role of scientific calculators, and what reasonable accommodations are on offer as substitutes (I used Matlab instead)
- showing how to generate HTML from LaTeX, as against promoting the inaccessible pdf.
- not sure why you mention that pdf is an output from MS Word. This process reduces accessibility.
- that you are really only touching on mathematics, not statistics or other related disciplines, many of which rely on students taking some courses in mathematics.

But the biggest one of all is that your audience is the students. By far, my experience is that it is the academic staff who need solutions and answers to their questions. Far too often such well-intentioned people are left asking their students about accessibility as if the 18 year old is an expert. At times, the student does know what is good practice, but at others, that is very hard to evaluate as they have only their experience to inform them. When I was 18, I was an expert in what I could do, and what I could not do; I had no idea of what competent, mathematically-inclined,  blind people were able to do and how far I still to go. Truth be told, I still don't know everything.

How will the academics see what your resources offer? In my opinion, they will see that they can continue doing everything the same way they have done for the last twenty years because it's all about the things students need to learn.

I sincerely hope you invest as much effort in informing academics in a public fashion as is being put into the students.

N.B. I am not wasting your time or mine discussing online teaching and learning platforms used at university. In my view the performance is so poor in terms of access that if I was a student today, I'd be using my dedicated support people to do the interacting for me so that I could get on with doing the necessary work.

All the best,
Jonathan

-----Original Message-----
From: BlindMath <blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org> On Behalf Of jxb1321--- via BlindMath
Sent: Tuesday, October 31, 2023 8:39 AM
To: blindmath at nfbnet.org
Cc: jxb1321 at alumni.bham.ac.uk
Subject: [BlindMath] A Project to Help New Students

Hi Everyone,
This is my first time posting here.  I've made use of the archives over the past few years.

I've been working on a project with the University of Birmingham to make some signposting resources for blind students at the university. We're trying to compile a list of  resources so that people joining the department who might need them can browse them conveniently.

It's based on the personal experience of only a few students and is far from comprehensive but I thought I'd link it here incase anyone else wants to contribute or would find it useful.

<https://vimathsresources.github.io/vimathsresources/>
Resources for Visually Impaired Students<https://vimathsresources.github.io/vimathsresources/>
vimathsresources.github.io<https://vimathsresources.github.io/vimathsresources/>
[X]<https://vimathsresources.github.io/vimathsresources/>

Best Wishes,
Jimmy

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