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I teach math at a university. A couple years ago I had two blind students in my section of first-year calculus, and I really struggled with the tooling. Using l

by kkylin 3y ago

I teach math at a university. A couple years ago I had two blind students in my section of first-year calculus, and I really struggled with the tooling. Using latexml, I could produce documents that one of the students could use with a screen reader, but the other student never managed to make it work on their machine. Both students prefer braille but I didn't find anything open source that could typeset mathematical braille easily. Our disability resource office sends things out to a contractor to typeset into braille; the turn-around is measured in weeks. Anyway, if you (or anyone else reading this) has suggestions I'd really appreciate it!

lostlogin 3y ago
> Our disability resource office sends things out to a contractor to typeset into braille; the turn-around is measured in weeks. This seems a massive gap in the market - many institutions have funding earmarked for such things.
- hedora 3y ago
  I wonder if this is a useful service that an llm could actually outperform humans on.
Saigonautica 3y ago
Interesting! I never thought about this, thank you for sharing. What kind of turn-around time would be practical? Could you point me to any typeset mathematical braille that would be an example of a solution to your problem? Is Nemeth the only important standard, or are others important for you too? I'm wondering if it's practical to set this up as back-office work here in Vietnam. There are some outlying provinces here where there are very few job opportunities. Job opportunities for the blind also round down to zero here (e.g. I could hire for proofreading). Maybe there's room to do something cool here.
- kkylin 3y ago
  Our textbook of choice didn't have a braille version, so we sent it out to be converted one chapter at a time. Since textbooks don't change often, a turn-around of weeks is not so bad if we knew the students were going to be in the course. What would be very useful for me to be able to typeset myself are small things -- homework, quizzes, and (to a lesser extent) exams. Since homework and quizzes often have to adapt to what I actually covered in class, which may or may not match the syllabus, it's hard to rely on sending this out to be typset by others. (Exams are a little easier since they're usually done days ahead of the actual date.) AFAIK Nemeth is the only standard that matters. If I can typeset a document, send it to the student, and they can get it on a braille display (no need for this to be on paper), it would solve a ton of problems.
- miki123211 3y ago
  How's English proficiency (and American braille code proficiency) like in Vietnam? Keep in mind that most blind people who speak English fluently but don't live in an English-speaking country (myself included) can't read English braille, or at least not well. Because of how voluminous Braille is, it uses contractions, single characters that replace common words and character combinations like "the", "would", "ing" or "ed". Those tend to be language specific, never taught outside their country or countries of use, and hard to get accessible electronic materials for. The math codes are completely different too, we use something derived from Marburg, while English-speaking countries use Nemeth. Even basic characters like + and - differ between those two, not to mention more complicated structures. It's not just the dot patterns that are different but also the design principles, like where you put spaces or when you can omit "begin fraction" / "end fraction" characters.
miki123211 3y ago
I learned (the basics of) LaTeX in my last year of middle school, and stuck with it ever since. To be fair, I was into computers since I was a child, played with Rockbox at the age of 10, started to dabble in programming shortly after, so this was a lot less scary than most of the things I was doing already. I took my middle and high school finals (they're kind of like SAT but matter a lot more) by producing LaTeX output, which I then compiled to PDF and printed. The test itself was in braille, as that was all that our government could do. Throughout college, my first question to most of my professors of math subjects was "do you do LaTeX, and can you give me your source code." Most said yes, and that's how we worked. LaTeX in, LaTeX or PDF out, depending on what the professor preferred. The amount of LaTeX you need for calculus 1 isn't that great, you could probably teach it to a relatively bright student if you had an hour or two to spare, and then give them the source files. If you have the time, I'd suggest producing "stripped" versions of your files, with as little markup as possible to get your point across and no fancy formatting unless absolutely necessary. The amount of hoops some books and papers jump through to "look nice" drives me crazy. You could also consider producing, teaching and consuming ASCII math, which seems like an even simpler and friendlier format. I couldn't really use it much in my school career for boring technical reasons, but it looks like a promising option.
- kkylin 3y ago
  Thanks for the suggestions! When you LaTeX your work to turn in, do you work only with the source, or do you have a good way to read the PDF output? I agree the amount of LaTeX needed for calculus is pretty minimal. One of my students was taking chemistry at the same time, which is (I think) much tougher for blind students. But they also had more teaching assistants for the course.
  - miki123211 3y ago
    I don't interact with the PDF output myself, but I can compile and email PDFs if I need to send work over to people who do not wish to receive LaTeX themselves, a fact I used throughout most of my high-school education, where LaTeX knowledge was rare. This is why I eschew formatting where possible, I can do enough to make my symbols look right and be understandable to a sighted reader not familiar with LaTeX, but not necessarily to make things extra pretty. Not actually seeing the output makes it a lot more difficult to check your formatting work.

by kkylin 3y ago

lostlogin 3y ago

> Our disability resource office sends things out to a contractor to typeset into braille; the turn-around is measured in weeks. This seems a massive gap in the market - many institutions have funding earmarked for such things.

hedora 3y ago
I wonder if this is a useful service that an llm could actually outperform humans on.

Saigonautica 3y ago

Interesting! I never thought about this, thank you for sharing. What kind of turn-around time would be practical? Could you point me to any typeset mathematical braille that would be an example of a solution to your problem? Is Nemeth the only important standard, or are others important for you too? I'm wondering if it's practical to set this up as back-office work here in Vietnam. There are some outlying provinces here where there are very few job opportunities. Job opportunities for the blind also round down to zero here (e.g. I could hire for proofreading). Maybe there's room to do something cool here.

kkylin 3y ago
Our textbook of choice didn't have a braille version, so we sent it out to be converted one chapter at a time. Since textbooks don't change often, a turn-around of weeks is not so bad if we knew the students were going to be in the course. What would be very useful for me to be able to typeset myself are small things -- homework, quizzes, and (to a lesser extent) exams. Since homework and quizzes often have to adapt to what I actually covered in class, which may or may not match the syllabus, it's hard to rely on sending this out to be typset by others. (Exams are a little easier since they're usually done days ahead of the actual date.) AFAIK Nemeth is the only standard that matters. If I can typeset a document, send it to the student, and they can get it on a braille display (no need for this to be on paper), it would solve a ton of problems.
miki123211 3y ago
How's English proficiency (and American braille code proficiency) like in Vietnam? Keep in mind that most blind people who speak English fluently but don't live in an English-speaking country (myself included) can't read English braille, or at least not well. Because of how voluminous Braille is, it uses contractions, single characters that replace common words and character combinations like "the", "would", "ing" or "ed". Those tend to be language specific, never taught outside their country or countries of use, and hard to get accessible electronic materials for. The math codes are completely different too, we use something derived from Marburg, while English-speaking countries use Nemeth. Even basic characters like + and - differ between those two, not to mention more complicated structures. It's not just the dot patterns that are different but also the design principles, like where you put spaces or when you can omit "begin fraction" / "end fraction" characters.

miki123211 3y ago

I learned (the basics of) LaTeX in my last year of middle school, and stuck with it ever since. To be fair, I was into computers since I was a child, played with Rockbox at the age of 10, started to dabble in programming shortly after, so this was a lot less scary than most of the things I was doing already. I took my middle and high school finals (they're kind of like SAT but matter a lot more) by producing LaTeX output, which I then compiled to PDF and printed. The test itself was in braille, as that was all that our government could do. Throughout college, my first question to most of my professors of math subjects was "do you do LaTeX, and can you give me your source code." Most said yes, and that's how we worked. LaTeX in, LaTeX or PDF out, depending on what the professor preferred. The amount of LaTeX you need for calculus 1 isn't that great, you could probably teach it to a relatively bright student if you had an hour or two to spare, and then give them the source files. If you have the time, I'd suggest producing "stripped" versions of your files, with as little markup as possible to get your point across and no fancy formatting unless absolutely necessary. The amount of hoops some books and papers jump through to "look nice" drives me crazy. You could also consider producing, teaching and consuming ASCII math, which seems like an even simpler and friendlier format. I couldn't really use it much in my school career for boring technical reasons, but it looks like a promising option.

kkylin 3y ago
Thanks for the suggestions! When you LaTeX your work to turn in, do you work only with the source, or do you have a good way to read the PDF output? I agree the amount of LaTeX needed for calculus is pretty minimal. One of my students was taking chemistry at the same time, which is (I think) much tougher for blind students. But they also had more teaching assistants for the course.
- miki123211 3y ago
  I don't interact with the PDF output myself, but I can compile and email PDFs if I need to send work over to people who do not wish to receive LaTeX themselves, a fact I used throughout most of my high-school education, where LaTeX knowledge was rare. This is why I eschew formatting where possible, I can do enough to make my symbols look right and be understandable to a sighted reader not familiar with LaTeX, but not necessarily to make things extra pretty. Not actually seeing the output makes it a lot more difficult to check your formatting work.