[BlindMath] Accessibility for Stats courses

Fri Sep 8 20:54:03 UTC 2017

Hello all,

RStudio remains out of range for screen reader users and the latest I have from them (July 2017) is that there is no immediate plan to get on top of the accessibility issues. I reiterated my willingness to assist during that face to face encounter because I suspect it will be easier to fix than they do.

The usefulness of RStudio for standard undergraduate teaching is increasing and it is becoming more widespread. This is principally because of the use of R markdown to produce the analyses. R markdown files are plain text so are screen reader friendly and the standard output format is HTML which is of course screen reader friendly. I use R markdown almost daily, and now insist on all of my students using it too. But, while it is easy to use R markdown in RStudio, it is also fairly easy to do so in the standard installation of R which is how I do it. So aside from the actual method being used, a blind student can have the same approach to creating an analysis as their sighted classmates if everyone is using R markdown.

I firmly believe that the instructors for the course need to play a key role in the solutions being proposed for any blind students they teach. I remain open to having discussions with instructors who will use R in their teaching of blind students. I get about one email question every two weeks, and have had two Skype calls lasting more than an hour each in the last two months. Disability support staff are welcome during these calls, but mostly they don't speak R and stats well enough to lead that discussion.

As always, I direct your attention to https://R-Resources.massey.ac.nz and its subpages. If you see something that you feel needs updating then please do holler.

I would also direct instructors to read the articles:
- A. Jonathan R. Godfrey. Statistical software from a blind person’s perspective: R is the best, but we can make it better. The R Journal, 5(1):73–79, June 2013. 
- A. Jonathan R. Godfrey and Robert Erhardt. Addendum to “statistical software from a blind person’s perspective”. The R Journal, 6(1):182, June 2014. 
- A. Jonathan R. Godfrey and M. Theodor Loots. Statistical software (R, SAS, SPSS, and Minitab) for blind students and practitioners. Journal of Statistical Software, Software Reviews, 58(1):1–25, July 2014. 
- A. Jonathan R. Godfrey and M. Theodor Loots. Advice from blind teachers on how to teach statistics to blind students. Journal of Statistics Education, 23(3):1–28, November 2015. 
All of which are open access publications.

Cheers,
Jonathan

-----Original Message-----
From: BlindMath [mailto:blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Sarah Jevnikar via BlindMath
Sent: Saturday, 9 September 2017 5:19 a.m.
To: 'Blind Math list for those interested in mathematics'
Cc: Sarah Jevnikar; 'Sweeney, Hope'
Subject: Re: [BlindMath] Accessibility for Stats courses

Hi there,
It looks like you've done lots of good research here; your students are lucky to have you. :)

Are all your students Braille readers and writers? What screen reading (if any) tools do they typically use?

Instructor slides can be a challenge, but if they use LaTeX, this can be translated into Braille using Duxbury, or spoken math using Math Type, Math player, Microsoft Word, and NVDA. I'm not sure how well this works with JAWS. This will not, of course, fix the problem of instructors not reading what they're writing on the board; that is still a matter of persuasion.

When you say accessible format for textbooks, what do you mean? I've had great success with Nemeth code texts (either as electronic Braille in .brf format or in hard-copy Braille) but mixed results with math ml files (in .xml format) when opened in Firefox with NVDA and Math Player. When the files would open, the math was spoken well but did not always appear on a Braille display.

I remember R working well (I've recently been using Stata) but your students should get used to using command lines and text logs of their output.

Learning LaTeX on their part will go a long way to making their math output easier for sighted instructors and graders to read. There are good pieces of software (Nemetex and Duxbury) that translate Braille math to print, but both only use Nemeth rather than UEB math and the latter (Duxbury) is still experimental.

What do you mean by Math Type working with handwriting? I've never come across this before and am intrigued.

I hope this is somewhat helpful

Sarah Jevnikar
BA Economics and International Relations 2017

-----Original Message-----
From: BlindMath [mailto:blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Sweeney, Hope via BlindMath
Sent: September 8, 2017 9:49 AM
To: blindmath at nfbnet.org
Cc: Sweeney, Hope
Subject: [BlindMath] Accessibility for Stats courses

Good Morning,
I am currently working with several students taking undergrad and grad level statistics courses.  We've sent the books to a third party vendor for accessible format but are working to ensure accessibility in day to day classes and other materials for the classes.  R and RStudio are being used- we are attempting to work with Braille R but I have nothing conclusive there yet.  As far as day to day class time, I found information on MathType being able to work with hand written equations and an App called IDEALMath that works the same.  I am hoping someone has a process they utilize that works well to ensure complete accessibility.  What absolutely hasn't worked so you've scrapped and/or had faculty scrap?

Regards,
Hope Sweeney

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