[Blindmath] Data on braille vs. speech use

[Sina Bahram]

Just one additional note on Steve's excellent message below. NVDA+MathPlayer
can also give you braille. Even though I was closely involved with the
design of that system for multiple years, when I actually felt nemeth
refreshing underneath my fingers with the capability to also interact in a
variety of advanced ways for the first time, it was both purely mind blowing
and incredibly rewarding. Exploring calculus from Wikipedia interactively
and also in Braille is something I would have given a lot for when I was
younger and learning mathematics.

Authoring mathematics is still a pipeline that a lot of us are thinking
about and working on, I know, but for the first time, I feel that the
problem of an eyes-free user reading and interacting with mathematics is at
least at the end of the beginning if not the beginning of the end, to
paraphrase a famous quote.

Steve, I can't wait to see that data. It sounds like a great study.

Take care,
Sina

President, Prime Access Consulting, Inc.
Twitter: @SinaBahram
Company Website: http://www.pac.bz
Personal Website: http://www.sinabahram.com
Blog: http://blog.sinabahram.com

-----Original Message-----
From: Blindmath [mailto:blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Steve
Noble via Blindmath
Sent: Saturday, March 19, 2016 9:01 PM
To: Blind Math list for those interested in mathematics
<blindmath at nfbnet.org>
Cc: steve.noble at louisville.edu
Subject: Re: [Blindmath] Data on braille vs. speech use

An ideal situation would be digital math (e.g., MathML) which would support
both text-to-speech with navigation as well as being ported to the braille
display. That's actually possible now when using NVDA+MathPlayer, as well as
when using VoiceOver. There's a listing on this page for more info:
http://msf.mathmlcloud.org/affordances/12

We have done research to test how well blind or low-vision high-school
students can complete math problems using math text-to-speech compared to
their common traditional methods of braille or magnified text. We didn't
have the braille display working when we did the studies, so students had to
figure out things using audio alone. The full results of these studies have
not yet been published, so I cannot really share any definitive outcomes.
However, the findings overall showed that students were roughly equally able
to arrive at the correct answer to problems commonly found in algebra at the
first-year level using either format, although it generally took them a bit
longer when using audio in comparison to their traditional method of doing
math. But you have to keep in mind that we were using NVDA+MathPlayer, which
can do really superb things as far as audio navigation of an expression. It
isn't at all the same as using a math textbook on tape, which is a really
poor experience.  

One very interesting finding was that accuracy when using audio with a few
very specific types of expressions actually was much better than when
students used hard-copy braille or magnified text, which we weren't
expecting. For instance, students did far better when solving expressions
which included nested parentheses by using speech than they did when using
braille or magnified text. But the opposite was true when students had to
simplify an extended algebraic expression containing a large number of
terms--braille was clearly the winner in this case. 

Of course, this doesn't exactly speak to your question about advanced
algebra, but it does demonstrate that a very good math-to-speech system may
be very useful even in the absence of braille, but ideally you would want to
have both audio output and braille output in sync. Clearly that would be the
best of both worlds.

--Steve Noble
steve.noble at louisville.edu
502-969-3088
http://louisville.academia.edu/SteveNoble


________________________________________
From: Blindmath [blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org] on behalf of Aqil Sajjad via
Blindmath [blindmath at nfbnet.org]
Sent: Saturday, March 19, 2016 5:00 AM
To: 'Blind Math list for those interested in mathematics'
Cc: Aqil Sajjad
Subject: [Blindmath] Data on braille vs. speech use

Is there any available data on the effectiveness with which people use
braille or speech output for doing high-level algebra? Especially at the
college or grad school level? I am genuinely curious since there are plenty
of strongly-held opinions around but was wondering if there is any data on
the subject.

For everyone's sake, I do hope that there is enough data to show that both
braille and speech can be used equally efficiently and that it depends on
the individual. But I will share my own opinions later.
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