[nfbcs] Seeking suggestions for helping blind students with math

[Walker, Michael E]

Hi, what worked for me when taking math classes was using my PAC Mate Omni with a Braille display. Since I only had to take lower level math classes like college algebra, basic calculus (also often called business calculus), basic probability and statistics, and business statistics, I didn't worry about fancy math packages like LaTeX for learning the concepts. I know that LaTeX is a markup language of its own, that one must spend time learning. For college algebra and calculus, what often got me by for doing things with fractions was denoting by parentheses. For example, I might write something like (x+3)/(x+5). Those opening and closing parentheses would make the operator precedence more clear in terms of what should be in the numerator and denominator. For statistics, we sometimes just used word form, instead of the special mathematical symbols (i.e. x bar). Since the statistics classes were for business majors, we often used Excel to perform our calculations.

I know there will be folks who disagree with me on this list in terms of the fact that you need to know the actual math symbols, but also remember that I wasn't aiming to become a blind mathematician. My goal was to work in IT, such as with installing servers and writing business application software, so what I mentioned above still got me by just fine. I got A's and B's in all my math courses.

Mike