Re: An inquiry about Mathematics courses and Braille
Yeah, I will be facing such things soon, very soon indeed. I have known I'll be doing a cs degree for a very long time, since highschool I'd say. However, I kind of postponed this untill the last moment, since I DK even now how to approach it. So, where can I learn latex? Is it as long and verbose as I herd it is? If so, how do or did you guys manage to complete the exams in time since it's so tedious to write by hand? or do you have something like autocomplete in vs or some excel like functions and templates to generate a good amount of the most verbose parts? lastly, how do you read it? I know you use mathplayer, sure, but can it interpret latex, or should I convert it to math ml? Lastly, I herd mathplayer has some problems with installing and uninstalling it, some com component isn't deregistered and the registry key can then be used as a backdoor by malware. Is this correct? and isn't mathtype paid, aren't equations hard to write in word as well, maybe even harder than latex?
Unfortunately, braille in math isn't an option for me, as the tutors in primary school didn't teach us enough of it. I went to a mainstream school since fifth grade, so that's why I only use braille for ordinary text and only when I feel like it, I prefer speech over anything else tbh. You know, it'd be quite a shame if I couldn't take the cs degree due to these things, as I was and still am particularely good at math in highschool.
Now, luckily for me, I don't want to follow the electrics and stuff, since I am going for a math/informatics profile anyway, though there are still accessibility problems I am furiously thinking how to solve.
So, in my country, we blind or in any other way disabled people don't have as many rights as in the USA, and here were you USA guys claiming it's hard for you, just live here for a month, and you'll desperately want your accessibility things back, never ever saying they're too expensive, that people don't do enough just the bare minimum to pass by that law, and never, never that you really have it hard.
So, to clear things up, we have some rights, but due to the way they're implemented and some other factors that'd rather belong to the society, they aren't ever truely useful. For example, we get a kind of ssi too, but it's petifully small...like, it isn't quite enough to pay ones bills for the month with it, needless to speak about food and stuff. Why it happens, I DK, but it's weird...I actually do kind of have my own view about why this is how it is, but I am not gonna go into politics here, so suffice it to say it's obscure.
Next, almost nothing is paid by the state, not even jaws for those who still use it.
Furthermore, there is no accessibility policy thing like in the usa, telling app makers who sell to the state to make their thing accessible. So, if my online school works with software that has some accessibility pieces by accident and not design, I could well sue them and be as likely to winn as lose. There are some rules about accessibility here, like materials need to be adapted according to the person's dissability, but they're so loosly written and they leave plenty places a bit open to interpretation imho.
Well, another thing would be to make reasonable conversation with those leading the college I want to go to in advance, and that's what I did. However, I got a response like we've never had blind people here and blah...blah...blah. Then, they said they don't have any special tools or whatever to work with the blind at all, and that I can go, but they can't guarantee I would have good accessibility. Then, when I tried explaining, like a reasonable man in normal conversation, that they won't have to do many things, just give me some understanding regarding, for example, the time limit for exams, the fakt I need a comp equipped with a synth in the lab or to be able to bring my own computer, or that if this isn't possible, to let me record the lectures, I even suggested it would be good if they could give me the latex sources of courses with math, so that I could understand them better and at my own pase. I got some let's call them no, get away...<insert sarcastic thing here> kind of answers. For example, they invoked the privacy protection and data blah blah blah eu legislation about recording, saying that all teachers I want to record must agree with it, and somehow implying that they won't, or is this only me? Next, they said they can't be sure the nvda or any other such program doesn't have some viruses or spying backdoors or whatever in them, and going as far as to suggest I could use those backdoors my self to give me some advantages and shit. Then, about my comp in the lab, they said something about security and that they can't really let a non-institution provided comp connect to their software and networks because it might open them to volnerabilities. OK, I might agree with them on the last one, but seriously, how the hell can one think assistive technologies have backdoors intentionaly built into them?
So, I think that I will use my comp for note-taking and stuff, with latex if necessary, and will bring a stick with the portable version of nvda or just use narrator, assuming their software is accessible of course. That's all I could come up with for now, let me know what you think.
and, now to the informatics part of it, there it's not quite what I'd expect as well, just a bit of theory and stuff, then something about image processing. I mean, seriously?
now about grafs. So, what is this tactile graffing paper, never herd of it. And how does that draftsman tool you mentioned work, @4?
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