[nfbcs] Seeking suggestions for helping blind students with math

[Deborah Armstrong]

This might be a bit off-topic, but here goes. I am blind and work at a community college, mostly with LD students. But because I am blind, blind students naturally see me as a mentor though I'm just the alternate media specialist. My job is to acquire their books in alternate formats, to convert the books if necessary and to assist them in learning to read with access technology. I am not expected to worry about whether they can pass math, but I do!

Anyway, I know of three students this quarter, and there could be more, who are struggling with math, either pre-algebra, algebra or statistics.

When I was in school I was expected to use the abacus for calculating and the Braille writer with Nemeth to work problems. I was an early experiment in mainstreaming, so never took any math in high school at all. I wasn't good in math. It wasn't until I learned to write software that I discovered how much fun it was to craft programs to solve problems. So I'm not really mentor material for these struggling students.

I feel powerless about how to help them, and nowadays if you don't pass intermediat algebra you can't get even an AA. And if you don't pass statistics most humanities degrees are also out of reach. With my LD students I can help them find tutors, or get the book from Learning Ally, or show them how to mask off part of a textbook page so they can avoid confusion while reading. But the basic problem for my BVI students is that even the tutors have no idea how to work with someone who cannot see.

Nearly all my BVI students have iPADS and yet I've never found an app that will let them work problems like a sighted person using a pencil. Seems like there should be an app to do this. And as for Braille, I haven't seen any Braille readers entering this college for the past seven years. A few students can see well enough to magnify the class whiteboard for short periods but often it's not effective enough to truly follow the instructor.

The students succeed well enough in other courses where they can take notes on an iDEVICE, and use NVDA or VoiceOver or Zoom on their Mac at home to go online. But with math you have to write down the intermediate steps as you solve a problem, be able to show your work to your tutor, and follow the instructor solving problems in class.

And I go to classes with them to observe the problem and the instructors are all working equations on the board, pointing to various parts of the equation and not even speaking in full sentences. How has math become such a highly visual subject to teach?

Anyway, I hate seeing all these young people fail. How can I help them?

--Debee