I have worked with a few blind students over the years and it seems that part of the chance of success depends on whether they have a history of visual symbolism IN their heads PRIOR to going blind (say from diabetes) later in life. I once had a student for whom this was the case ... where trying to verbalize TO him about what symbols looked like ... or saying (which is very VERY difficult NOT to do ... ) ... "imagine that you have ... " ... or "think about a ... "
SIDEBAR: This same student used to tell me that he was going to take different routes from my office DOWN to the lower end of campus (which at the main campus of Penn State, is no simple matter) ... because he got BORED with the same old way ... which I thought was very interesting!
Personally, meaning NO disrespect for David's excellent text materials, I just don't think you can transform a regular text ... that demands and assumes a good VISUAL and SYMBOLIC capability ... into straight text and alternatives for symbols for formulas ... and have it work very well.
Teaching blind students in an area like this is far more challenging and complex ... than that.
IMHO of course
At 11:45 AM 4/2/2004, David C. Howell wrote:
Frank,
I don't have a solution to your question, but I would be willing to make an electronic version (Word) of the book available to you. I don't know if that would speed the text-to-voice conversion, but it might. In that version the equations are set with MathType 5.0, although individual characters are often set using the standard symbol font.
I know that in the past Gary McClelland at Univ. of Colorado has worked with blind students studying statistics. It is possible that he could be of help. His address is Gary McClelland <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Let me know if there is anything that I can do to help. For many students, learning statistics when you can see the formulae is hard enough.
Dave
At 10:22 AM 4/2/2004 -0500, you wrote:I am looking for help in dealing with text that contains mathematical symbols, which has to be recognized by a text-to-voice conversion system. We are using Jaws, in this case. This is for the benefit of two blind students I have in the class, and who are bravely attempting a major in Psychology. The text is D. Howell's "Fundamental Statistics for the Behavioural Sciences".
First we scan the text using Omnipage into an electronic version. However, Omnipage skips over math symbols, and we have to edit the output to make it suitable for Jaws, which converts it to voice. When dealing with an entire textbook, this can be very slow work.
This university has a well-resourced Disability Unit that our students can rely on, but my course textbook remains a problem for them.
It would be nice to hear from other people with experience in this kind of process. Perhaps someone has useful suggestions for making it more efficient, or persons to make contact with?
Other than the Howell text, are there perhaps more general materials available for teaching basic applied statistics with blind students?
Frank Bokhorst Psychology Dept. University of Cape Town South Africa
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Dennis Roberts
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