Thursday, February 10, 2022 Schedule

Noon Eastern Thursday Session

Keynote – Zach Lattin discussing “Arbitrarily Close to Access in STEM”

1 PM Eastern Thursday Sessions

Proposal Title: Starting where they are – helping lecturers to create accessible maths

Presenter

Lilian Joy (née Soon) and Natalie Curran, University of York

Presentation Summary

Trying to create an environment where lecturers can create accessible maths is multi-faceted and requires quite a few streams of work. In this session, LIlian presents the approach taken by the University of York in England over a few years to progress accessible maths with the help of student interns, lecturers and disabled students. She will describe the infrastructure and projects required to make creating accessible maths easy for all. Finally, the user research conducted with one blind maths student, with her own unique way of accessing and creating maths, will be discussed.

Key Points:

  • What a whole organisation approach to accessible maths looks like.
  • Start from where the lecturers are and support them to move up the accessible maths ladder.
  • User research is key to getting it right.

You can reach Lilian Joy (née Soon) at LinkedIn

You can reach Natalie Curran at LinkedIn

Proposal Title: The Learning Curve: Supporting Students in STEM courses 

Presenter

Martina Svyantek, University of Virginia – SDAC

Presentation Summary

Student support for STEM courses, especially in higher education, has to keep pace with a wide variety of delivery formats, classroom experiences, and final grades. Providing additional resources for student use within and outside of the classroom setting is important for success, but those resources have to be readily available without adding additional burdens. By combining traditional supports with new technologies, Student Disability Resource Offices can utilize both cutting-edge knowledge and hard-earned experience to benefit their campuses by combining traditional supports, such as notetakers and scribes, with “new” technologies, including smart pens and speech to text softwares. What might be commonplace within the walls of the Resource Office might still take students by surprise – built-in tools that are already part of their computers and phones are just as important to bring to light as the latest edu-tech. Building a solid foundation in the basics, as well as how to find more information and guides for in-depth use, serves not only the student population but faculty and staff alike. This session will discuss how to combine new tools and old techniques, covering notetaking, study skills, and exam use that combine human interactions with the latest gadgets, such as EquatIO, Glean, and Otter.

Key Points

  • Getting new tools ready takes time
  • You can use existing resources in multiple ways
  • Different users have different needs

You can reach Martina Svyantek at LinkedIn

You can reach Martina Svyantek at Twitter (faster response)

Proposal Title: Enhancing server-side MathJax rendering with common ARIA patterns to provide robust, richly accessible equation layout at scale

Presenter

Peter Krautzberger, krautzource UG, Germany

Presentation Summary

Equation layout (e.g., math mode TeX/LaTeX, asciimath, groff/eqn, MathML) provides a particular challenge to render visually on the web. Additionally, accessibility traditions for equation layout (e.g. Nemeth Braille and MathSpeak) create a set of orthogonal expectations that is difficult to address.

MathJax (https://www.mathjax.org/) and Speech-Rule-Engine (SRE) (https://speechruleengine.org/) provide state-of-the-art visual and non-visual rendering, applying complex heuristics to enrich content for use on the web. However, when publishing on the web (and adjacent technologies such as epub), content providers may not be able to reliably expect MathJax+SRE to work client-side because JavaScript technologies can fail to work either for technical reasons (e.g., poor network conditions, JS blocked) or practical limitations (e.g., JS performance on mobile devices).

In this talk, I will present an approach to enhance server-side generated MathJax rendering using common ARIA patterns, in particular in the shape of aria-tree-walker (https://github.com/krautzource/aria-tree-walker). This combination allows for a robust visual and non-visual rendering together with client-side progressive enhancement. The result is a richly detailed navigation/exploration experience on contemporary screen readers flanked by a solid baseline/fallback experience. This approach can even work in web-adjacent technologies such as epub. I will also discuss practical considerations arising from the experience of implementing this approach in the production workflow at the American Mathematical Society (https://www.ams.org) as well as benefits this approach can offer for non-AT users.

Key Points:

  • Server-side MathJax+SRE rendering can be progressively enhanced for fully explorable rendering.
  • Standard ARIA patterns provide a robust, user-friendly approach to accessible equation layout.
  • This approach works at large scale and provides paths towards further enhancements.

You can reach Peter Krautzberger at LinkedIn

2 PM Eastern Thursday Sessions

Proposal Title: Blind and Sighted Access Math Together in New Ways

Presenter

Betsey Doane, Housatonic Community College

Presentation Summary

Mathematics content is now accessible in the Word equation editor and is read by the JAWS and NVDA screen readers. The new JAWS Braille math editor is an exciting tool that now allows blind and visually impaired students to communicate mathematics content as it is being rendered. I, as a totally blind mathematics professor will demonstrate this capability. A demonstration of how blind and visually impaired students can understand and communicate graphs using the Desmos graphing calculator and some information about how professors can make their math content accessible will be included.

Key Points:

  • Mathematics is more accessible today than ever before.
  • The blind and visually impaired students can perform the same tasks as their sighted counterparts.
  • Professors need to make their assignments readable by screen readers.

You can reach Betsey Doane at LinkedIn

Proposal Title: Adding Voice in an accessible manner to PDF files

Presenter

Sharon Austin, University of Tampa

Presentation Summary

Math is a language which, because of its notational nature, is often problematic for assistive technology to render in the correct order of operations, and with the correct pronunciation. Math teachers spend a lifetime learning their subject, but do not often have the additional significant time required to learn how tag mathematics properly in a PDF document. A powerful tool for the mathematics teacher is to record her own voice as a way to read the mathematical equation aloud in the proper manner, and then learn how to embed the voice in an accessible manner in the PDF. The workload for the mathematics teacher then becomes reduced from learning how to tag a PDF for mathematics — which has an extremely high learning curve — to simply learning now to embed a voice recording in an accessible manner. This method also greatly reduces the need for specialized software or hardware, thus making the alternative mode both more affordable (to the student, to the teacher, to the school) and far less draconian to produce. This method also allows a means by which teachers may embed mathematical explanations in languages other than English without having to rely on the skill set required for localization.

Key Points:

  • Natural Language is difficult to reproduce via synthesis, and particularly for Math
  • Localization is a problem for assistive technology; this method allows international audiences to participate
  • It is easy to add audio to a PDF, training is required to do so in an accessible manner

View Sharon Austin Contact Info

Proposal Title: Computational approach to teach upper division mathematics classes to diverse audiences.

Presenters

Haohao Wang (and Jerzy Wojdylo), Southeast Missouri State University, U.S.A.

Presentation Summary

In this presentation, we will share our experience in using computational approach to teach linear algebra and cryptography to mixed audiences of upper division math major, beginning graduate students, and students from the field of science and engineering. We will share a few of our teaching strategies, for example combining the materials with definitions and proofs with an emphasis on computational applications; providing illustrative examples by software packages such as Mathematica, Sage, and TI Voyage 200; arranging students project presentations in departmental seminar or professional conferences. Our approach bridges the gap between abstract theory and the computational applications.

Key Points:

  • Computation helps students learn to analyze data sets, formulae, and understand the abstract theories.
  • Building computational skills helps students develop problem solving skills, logic and reasoning.
  • Learning to use various software packages prepare the students for future careers or higher educations.

View Haohao Wang Contact Info

View Jerzy Wojdylo Contact Info

3 PM Eastern Thursday Sessions

Proposal Title: Solidifying the Delivery of Math Content in the Online Environment

Presenters

Gabriel Angrand, Rashmi Kumar, Amrou Ibrahim, Weingarten Center, University of Pennsylvania

Presentation Summary

The proposed presentation will focus on solidifying the delivery of math content in the online environment by introducing some best practices for achieving the broader goal in the Universal Design for Learning framework to develop expert learners who are “purposeful, motivated, resourceful, knowledgeable, strategic, and goal-directed” (Oyarzun, B., Bottoms, B. L., & Westine, C., 2021. p. 10). We explore 3 attributes of math content in the online environment: accessibility of LMS platforms, responsive web design, and multimodal learning.

The choices and challenges associated with creating a better online experience for students involve uploading course materials in accessible formats, capitalizing on the affordances of responsive web design, and providing multiple methods for accessing, learning, and demonstrating mastery of course content (text, graphs, and equations).

The presenters are part of an Academic Support Office at a large private university that is made up of 12 individual schools including four undergraduate and 8 graduate schools. Gabriel Angrand is a STEM Learning Specialist, Rashmi Kumar is an Associate Director in Academic Support, and Amrou Ibrahim is an Associate Director in Disability Services. The presenters will discuss their experiences working with students enrolled in math coursework. The presentation will build upon feedback from faculty from the math department.

As academic support professionals, we offer the following questions for discussion: 1) What is our responsibility in making math content accessible for auditory/visual engagement? 2) Does our work stop at improving the capabilities of screen-readers and closed-captioning? 3) How does clarifying the actual goals of the course/assessment help us maximize the technology we already integrate and deploy?

Key Points

  • Accessibility is the practice of making websites usable by maximum people, including those with disabilities.
  • Multimodal Learning enables students to capture course content and demonstrate mastery in accessible ways.
  • Responsive design allows web pages to be device-responsive. Features: fluid grids and images and media query.

You can reach Gabriel Angrand at LinkedIn

You can reach Rashmi Kumar at LinkedIn

View Amrou Ibrahim Contact Info

Proposal Title: A gentle touch- Solutions when Alt Text is not possible

Presenters

Jason Khurdan and Ketty Ombadykow, Rutgers University

Presentation Summary

We are looking to present on various solutions Universities can use when they are unable to provide an Alt Text. There are many reasons for this including: the result of a highly complex image or diagram that cannot be described in a meaningful way using words; assignments that require you to draw diagrams; theoretical shapes that do not existing; etc.

In our presentation we would like to go over when to use, and how to use the following resources:

Use of the Draftsboard to make real time tactile graphics in class
Use of the WikiSticks
Use of computer programs like Desmos
In person and remote support options (i.e sharing your screen for things like mindtap)
Making effective tactile graphics
The rise of 3D printing for allowing students to interact with content

Key Points

  • Managing in-class content with tactile graphics
  • Managing interactive content with Tactile graphics
  • The role of in-class assistants for third party software

You can reach Jason Khurdan at LinkedIn

You can reach Ketty Ombadykow at LinkedIn

Proposal Title: Using tactile graphics to enhance math comprehension in STEM

Presenter

Dan Gardner, ViewPlus Technologies Inc

Presentation Summary

Helping blind students achieve their full potential in STEM subjects and careers is the mission of ViewPlus Technologies. With COVID-19 limiting travel for more than a year, our entire company focused on what more can be done to support teachers for the visually impaired (TVI) and parents to make sure blind students can access all relevant technical information in a timely manner. In addition, blind students and their sighted peers can benefit from access to a tactile graphics and braille printer.

Our research shows that there was a need for better access for more people to a tactile graphics and braille printer. With the release of the APH PixBlaster printer in 2020, more schools and agencies have access to tactile graphics and braille than ever before by using the Federal Quota System. Now, in 2021-22, ViewPlus is releasing some brand-new tactile graphics hardware and software products.

The focus is on easier to use software products to ease the burden on teachers and parents who don’t need one more difficult, technical product flow to learn. More than ever before, ViewPlus is partnering with others to create and streamline distribution of tactile graphics in ready to print format, from walking maps to tactile images straight from the news. These innovations help lift some of the burden on the TVI to both understand how to create the tactile graphics and braille, plus enough technical content knowledge in all subjects to create a meaningful tactile graphics from the standard curriculum given.

ViewPlus is also building on its history of innovation with a concept for teaching color using texture fill patterns. These patterns can be used in both a new accessible drawing tool for blind users and a new tool for less technical sighted users to create meaningful tactile graphics with braille labels in just a few minutes.

Key Points

  • What are three ways to represent color in a tactile graphic?
  • What are best practices for laying out a tactile graphic math plot
  • What are three tools that allow mixing braille and tactile graphics?

View Dan Gardner Contact Info