[nfbcs] Research

Sat Feb 25 21:51:56 UTC 2017

I am definitely guilty of hijacking this thread; sorry about that.

I do think though, this is one of the few threads that lives up to the
listname (NFB cS).

Please find below my answers to your survey.

Rick,

If there were a simple solution, you wouldn't see this kind of a thread.
Not a Ph.D, though I went as far as to make a few visits after being
accepted to two top 25 programs for the very little that's worth.

I do think though there's a good place to start and that's with STEM
education k-12. My general sense is blind students don't have good tools to
keep up with their peers and that translate to a college setting.

Answers:
Research questions:
Advocacy:
(1)     What accommodations do you believe were most beneficial to you in
completing your degree?
Receiving electronic equivalents to everything. This includes preso slides,
exams, handouts, readers (these are xeroxed copies of text content made by
the prof, not a human reader), etc. This stuff needed to be negociated with
each prof and usually came in the form of laTeX (which most of them wrote
in).

(2)     What accommodation(s) were necessary when completing visual
components of one’s degree requirements?
Human readers, classmates, alternative assignments.

(3)     In what ways have you advocated for the modification of materials
to ensure equal access for yourself or future computer science students?
Get the source of truth for everything. That means find the author, get the
rawest form they have anything in. For example, if you have a textbook, ask
the author for source material. Knuth, for example, actually wrote the Art
of Computer Programming in laTeX (naturally).

(4)     What is the most important question(s) a computer science student
should ask their instructors before and during a selected course of study?
Do you have any graduate students who can serve as a mentor? Note that this
kind of naturally comes if you are assigned a TA for the course.

(5)     Are there any Universities, companies, or organizations who have
been greater benefactors?
???

Academics:
(1)     How much math and science is necessary for a person to be
successful within the computer science field.
This is totally determined by the prerequisites of your college/university.
Typically, you are on the hook for up to multi variable calculus, linear
algebra, discrete math. In addition, you may benefit from courses in
probability/statistics (machine learning), abstract algebra (for
cryptography), numerical analysis, and other upper division math for
specific branches of the CS coursework.
For science, I think most schools like to see the typical slate of bio,
chem, physics. In addition, there is usually some course in EE (electrical
engineering) that covers the basics of circuits, signals, etc as part of an
undergrad program.

(2)     In general, are materials accessible with access technology?
This question is entirely too general. Depends on too many factors to say.
Does your prof write their materials in tex? In PowerPoint? Are they a
budding prof writing their own book? (no chance it's on Learning Ally). Are
you taking a EE course where you're required to hook things up in hardware?
Are your labs using unix and do you know the toolchain? Are you like most
blind students and only know JFW?

(3)     What are some effective, and somewhat universal, techniques for
manipulating and writing computer languages?
Take a course on compilers and programming languages. The coursework at
Berkeley is interesting because the first course in the official set of
lower division requirements actually has you building an interpreter for
Scheme. Once you understand the semantics of a language, you can move
around by semantic units (just like English).

(4)     In what ways did your assignments get modified, to establish equal
access to all requirements?
Not much actually. More of the work is on you to learn the right set of
tools. Since practically everything in computers is accessible if you dig
far enough, this is an option. The main ask I had was to receive source
materials (see above).

(5)     What are some effective ways for designing accessible algorithms
and data structures?
What does accessibility have anything to do with it?

(6)     When developing a portfolio, did you find an accessible way of
publicly displaying your code, or for hosting your portfolio?
You can build your own site, put code up on github, answer questions on
stackoverflow, answer public questions (e.g. on this list), contribute to
open source, publish your own app, etc etc.

(7)     After publishing your code, what methods do you use to ensure the
visible code is visually appealing or readable?
Ask someone (or crowd source it). You can even ask someone to help with
layout.

(8)     Are there any courses you might recommend to take in high school to
prepare someone going into the computer science field?
AP Computer Science A/AB (that was back in ~2002).

(9)     Besides the source work required to obtain your degree, what
additional course work might you recommend to enhance one’s employment
effectiveness?
Internships. If you are attending a research university, most if not all
coursework is geared towards you getting a graduate degree at some point.
There might also be self paced courses, for specific skills / languages.

Access technology:
(1)     What access technology gave you the greatest degree of opportunity
to compete on an equal playing field with your peers?
Whatever enabled access to the same environment my peers were using. If a
course called for *nix, I used tools on linux, for example.

(2)     What challenges did access technology present when interacting with
the technology required to complete tasks and assignments for your computer
science degree or profession?
Probably lots but none come to mind. That's the beauty of studying CS. You
are expected and even encouraged to fix these things since you have the
source.

(3)     What role does access technology play in the completion of your
daily assignments or tasks?
Like any other component in a system they are used when I use a computer.

(4)     How might modifications to standard technology create more
opportunity for usability with access technology?
Not entirely sure what you're going for here. Are we talking about software
components?

General technology:
(1)     In what ways is the general technology inaccessible when paired
with access technology? Are there any work arounds for these issues?
Again, not sure what you're going for here. Software can and does get
improved. Interactions between software depends on specific interfaces and
platforms.

(2)     What sort of accommodations are necessary for the use of most
general technology used in this field of study or profession?
There really isn't a standard set of "technology".

(3)     Can standard tasks be completed on a unit without extensive
modification or accommodations?
Unit?

Does most technology come ready to use? Are there ways to increase one’s
productivity when using Python JavaScript C++ swift and racket, and
integrated development environments (IDEs)—such as CodeLite, Eclipse,
NetBeans, VisualWX, Xcode, and KDevelop?
Varies depending on the IDE you're talking about.

On Sat, Feb 25, 2017 at 12:38 PM, michael Ausbun via nfbcs <nfbcs at nfbnet.org
> wrote:

> Well, the original post was intended to gather research to resolve some of
> the questions discussed
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> > On Feb 25, 2017, at 2:26 PM, Rick Thomas via nfbcs <nfbcs at nfbnet.org>
> wrote:
> >
> > Question:
> > Are there many, any, pHDs on this list from major universities?
> > I would be interested in hearing their opinion(s) on the 50000 foot view
> of a solution to the problem of students from all over the country
> attending hundreds of diferent universities and how they might envision a
> solution so the next generation of blind students might avoid at least some
> of the problems you all are ranting about.
> > I guess it makes you feel good but what is your targetted goal with this
> thread?
> > Do you envision any solutions that might help or is this just another
> bitch session about how dificult the current environment is?
> > Is there any goal you all have in mind and, if so, what is it in a
> simple single, non run on sentence?
> > This would at least target the thread in some direction.
> > Rick USA
> >
> >
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