Friday, February 11, 2022 Schedule
Noon Eastern Friday Sessions
Proposal Title: Tools Consideration for Accessible Mathematical Digital Content
Presenter
Brad Held, University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill
Presentation Summary
What challenges do instructors face when creating STEM digital content? Due to the complexity of math symbols, the plethora of worksheets in circulation, and the requirements to ‘show their work’, it has been difficult to create a digital equivalent. Attendees will learn promising solutions already available to STEM instructors for producing STEM digital content.
You can reach Brad Held at LinkedIn
Proposal Title: Accessible and Digital STEM Made Easy with EquatIO
Presenters
Rachel Kruzel and Louis Shanafelt, Texthelp
Presentation Summary
Creating accessible STEM content can be a challenging, time consuming, and complicated process. Faculty express frustrations around the necessity of creating digital and accessible content. Instructional designers or IT struggle to find a cost-effective tool to support faculty and students as they teach, learn, and assess in a myriad of environments online given the digital nature of our education system. Content remediators have a never-ending pile of books, assignments, and assessments needing to be made accessible for students and the campus community. Finding a sustainable solution for these long-standing issues is a must.
EquatIO, Texthelp’s digital and accessible STEM solution can help with these and other common pain points institutions face around creating accessible and digital STEM content. Attendees will see the power, ease of use, and solutions EquatIO can bring to a campus and the digital and online environments students, faculty, and staff work in, including:
- EquatIO’s Equation Editor with Prediction helps to quickly and easily create content with the use of a keyboard; not a padlet-based tool.
- Traditional accessibility tools like dictation, text-to-speech, and handwriting recognition allow individuals of all abilities to easily and confidently engage with STEM.
- Users can create and insert STEM content into the Rich Content Editors of popular LMS such as Canvas, D2L, Moodle, or Blackboard through the use of an LTI or the new and improved EquatIO web toolbar.
- EquatIO automatically generates alternative text for equations as spoken text and MathML; saving time and money during the remediation process.
- The recently released full page OCR functionality turns printed and written content into digital, accessible, and editable math, expediting the process of turning entire textbook chapters, printed exams, or lecture notes into accessible digital files.
Key Points
- EquatIO can help content creators easily create complex accessible and digital STEM through UDL input methods.
- EquatIO strategically supports the alt format remediation process for STEM content, including OCR and TTS.
- EquatIO interfaces with common educational environments as a pedagogical teaching tool, such as LMS.
You can reach Rachel Kruzel at LinkedIn
You can reach Louis Shanafelt at LinkedIn
Proposal Title: Accessible Calculus Instruction for Blind Students: Rethinking Visual Components of the Course
Presenters
Michael Kerckhove, Emily Helft, and Lily Dickson, University of Richmond
Presentation Summary
We describe our experience teaching calculus to a student who experienced complete vision loss by age 16. The student uses primarily VoiceOver on mobile Apple devices, and they do not prefer the use of tactile graphics, Nemeth Braille, or formatted math accessed via screen reader. The student enrolled in the course as a prerequisite for admission to our business school. Several innovations allowed us to meet the instructional needs of this student.
Early communication established a baseline of mathematical knowledge and allowed exploration of alternative technologies to supplement an audio edition of the textbook. A tactile math board was constructed as an aid to understanding function graphs and their calculus-related features. Recruitment of a dedicated learning assistant provided support within and outside of the classroom.
Flexibility in the flow of topics, the selection of applications, and the design of assessments can positively affect student understanding. Tangent triangles, easier to manipulate both mentally and on the tactile board, replaced the tangent line as the basic tool. Recursive algorithms, Newton’s and Euler’s Methods, made the use of lines computational and were easy for the student to understand and implement.
We learned of the difficulty in processing word problems and formulas from the student. Consistent use of linguistic and tactile cues helped the student to formulate and execute their solution strategies.
Oral exams with questions provided beforehand proved to be most effective, allowing sufficient time for the student to process information and outline a strategy before discussing their solution with the professor.
Information about the course from the student’s perspective was garnered via an exit interview. Recommendations stemming from our experience will be shared.
Key Points
- Visual comprehension is not only graphical. Processing formulas and algebraic manipulations is also difficult.
- Consistent use of linguistic and tactile cues is essential to problem-solving success for Blind students.
- Oral exams with questions given beforehand best enable the student to showcase what they’ve learned.
You can reach Michael Kerckhove at LinkedIn
You can reach Emily Helft at LinkedIn
1:00 PM Eastern Friday Sessions
Proposal Title: The Race Behind the Learning: Making Math Accessible
Presenter
Darren Gabbert and Angela Branson, University of Missouri – Columbia
Presentation Summary
Making math accessible in higher education is more than a process. And to say there is one right way to approach the task (forgive me) just doesn’t add up. This presentation shares our experience at the University of Missouri making the college Calculus series accessible to a blind student with skills in Nemeth Braille. While multiple processes where involved, timing, priorities and communication made every process dynamic. We liken our experience to running race. We will talk about and demonstrate our math accessibility journey in terms of:
Preparation – the pre-race, carb loading spaghetti dinner!
The race:
1) Where’s the starting gate?
Making math accessible can begin in many ways. A physical book, image only PDF, handwritten notes, and electronic documents with LaTeX are starting gates that we sometimes could choose from and other times just had to accept. Each have positive and negative aspects that will be noted.
2) Where’s the finish line?
Finish lines can include image only PDFs, screen reader accessible documents, Braille display accessible documents, Braille embossed documents, and tactile graphs. Focus of discussion will be on the finish lines associated with this case study, which included …
- Screen reader accessible documents;
- Nemeth Braille lecture content
- Tactile graphs for lecture content
3) Which path do I take? (using the right tool rightly)
- Create with MathType from scratch;
- Create with EquatIO or Mathpix from images
- Create Braille embossed pages with Duxbury
- Create tactile graph pages with TactileView
Wrap up – keys to success
- Organize production into manageable chunks
- Continuity between semesters
- Cost/benefit analysis of what is requested
- Faculty version of what is provided to student
- Readiness to think outside the box
- Use your resources
- Use your experts
Key Points
- Making math accessible can begin in many ways, each with positive and negative aspects
- Finished products also vary, which include screen reader accessible documents, Nemeth Braille & tactile graphs
- The path from start to finish involves using the right tools and holding to several keys to success
You can reach Darren Gabbert at LinkedIn
You can reach Angela Branson at LinkedIn
Proposal Title: Your Screen Reader Got an F in Arithmetic!
Presenters
Brian Richwine and Mary Stores, Indiana University Bloomington
Presentation Summary
Many technologies and corresponding workflows exist for creating accessible electronic mathematics content. For example, it is widely stated that web pages with math expressions encoded in MathML can be accessed independently by non-visual users via speech from a screen reading program. However, it’s not generally known that most screen reading software lacks the capability to read even basic algebraic expressions accurately and unambiguously. Speech dependent users will be misled and placed at a serious disadvantage by broken promises provided by current technological solutions.
The presenters will layout the case for why speech access to electronic math content is important, go over the common technologies for preparing accessible math content. Then we will demonstrate both where the technology works along with the many surprising places it does not work.
A case will be made for people to pool resources to determine an effective path forward for addressing the issues. A plea will be made for people to encourage AT vendors to take math access with speech seriously by working with math accessibility experts so their tools rise to the promise of being capable of speaking math content accurately, unambiguously, and consistent with established math speech grammars.
Key Points
- It’s widely stated that screen reading programs allow users to access mathematical content via speech-to-text
- The major screen reading programs lack the capability of speaking even basic mathematical content accurately
- Awareness must be raised to avoid disadvantaging users and to pool energies for addressing the situation
You can reach Brian Richwine at LinkedIn
Proposal Title: Using a Virtual Laboratory Assistant to Provide Accessible Procedures and Equations in STEM Laboratory Courses
Presenter
Jacob Watters, Metropolitan State University of Denver
Presentation Summary
One of the most important issues in STEM accessibility is creating a laboratory workspace accessible to students with blindness or visual impairments (VI). One of the many challenges students with VI face in the laboratory is accessible lab procedures and any equations they may contain. Current solutions to this problem focus on providing special accommodations such as asking sighted lab partners to assist in the laboratory work. Although the accessibility of laboratory devices in modern science education has been improved in recent years, basic voice dictation tools offer no interactivity and students with VI often remain passive learners. In this work, we present a new artificial intelligence tool, the MSU Denver Virtual Lab Assistant (VLA), developed using Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon Alexa Skills Kit (ASK), Alexa smart speaker, and a microcontroller (Raspberry Pi). The VLA allows students with VI to perform laboratory work independently by simply using the voice control feature of the VLA. The VLA provides interactive dictation of lab procedures written in the VLA Readable Format. This format supports equations that can be written in or converted to an accessible format such as MathJax. The VLA can be accessed through any smartphone or Amazon Echo device to relay general science lab procedures, dictate relevant equations, and perform computational tasks using voice control. This not only provides convenient interactive dictation but also allows students with VI to perform the laboratory work themselves using voice control. The VLA is designed to be applicable to a wide range of science laboratory work and is also compatible with other common accessible electronic devices such as the Talking LabQuest (TLQ). We believe that the VLA can promote STEM accessibility in higher education and be beneficial to general accessible science education work.
Key Points
- There is a lack of accessible tools for students with visual impairments in STEM laboratories.
- We have developed an interactive virtual assistant that facilitates accessible procedures and equations.
- Our tool enables students with visual impairments to use equations and preform lab work independently.
You can reach Jacob Watters at LinkedIn
2:00 PM Eastern Friday Closing Session
Proposal Title: Math in my world: accessibility through choice of assessment
Presenters
Marisha Marks and Ann Simao, Springfield Technical Community College
Presentation Summary
Universal Design for Learning is a pedagogical framework that strives to give students choice and flexibility to become self-directed learners. Construct relevant assessments are those that directly address the course learning outcomes. Authentic assessments relate to student daily lives. In this session we describe a community college math course in which students are provided with a choice of relevant and authentic assessments leading to learning mastery and success.
The age-old question in a math class is “When will I ever use this?” When we design courses with this question in mind, student engagement grows exponentially. We need to adjust our mindset from having students complete questions using formulas that they memorized to using assessments where students have flexibility to demonstrate their mastery of learning outcomes. As professors, we need to ask ourselves what skills we want our students to take with them when they leave our classroom. Out of the box assessments where guidelines are provided and calculations are required but students own the direction is key. We will provide hands-on examples of assessments that allow students to demonstrate mastery without the need for time requirements and other typical accommodations.
The redesigned class has received rave reviews from many students. Students enjoy the ability to apply the material that they have learned to their world rather than plugging numbers into a formula. This course also incorporates journal entries to determine where students are struggling. These journal entries have shown that students enjoy the practical application of course material. On the other hand, student journals increase the time to grade student work because of the flexibility and diversity of responses. There is not a single answer key. Come learn ways to balance the amount of work it takes to grade flexible assessments.
Key Points
- Choice of traditional and alternate assessments gives students flexibility and builds in UDL
- Personalized assessments linked to real-life scenarios add relevance and engagement
- Teaching for mastery by allowing assignment resubmission to meet course learning outcomes