Any idea where we can get these scripts for spss?
-----Original Message----- From: macvisionaries@googlegroups.com [mailto:macvisionar...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Chris Hofstader Sent: Friday, 28 August 2009 1:34 a.m. To: macvisionaries@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: Statistics packages Hi, The "industry standard" for statics packages is SSPS and I do not know if there is a Macintosh version. Peter Orem (probably misspelled) in the UK wrote a set of JAWS scripts and tends to keep them up to date so he and other blinks can use the program. Math in general is a very touchy subject around people with vision impairment. LaTeX is an excellent notation system but was designed to generate nicely formatted print output. Knuth (now a professor at Stanford who hates being bothered), authored of TeX and LaTex and, in one of his fairly rare public statements expressed near shock that people were using the tools to actually manipulate equations. I would recommend the Nimith (also likely misspelled) or DotsPlus (John Gardner of ViewPlus) Braille systems for math. Both were designed from the ground up to be used by blind people (Nimith and Gardner are both blind) and both take up less very expensive real estate on a refreshable display. You can contact Gardner personally at ViewPlus, I think Abe Nimith is long retired and probably hard to find. The basic differences in the systems is that Gardner uses an 8 dot output and Nimith, being much older, uses only the original 6 dots. While Gardner can fit more information in a single, thus furthering the efficiency of those expensive cells, it is far less widely known so, if you encounter other blinks, they will be more likely to know Nimith than any of the eight or nine other systems, including Gardner, out there for math. If you live in Australia, though, you will find a whole lot of DotsPlus users doing math with Braille - I've no clue why people down under embraced that system over the others except that, to many people, it is thought to be superior and because fewer cells so a smaller Braille display will work decently. Once again, I don't know if SSPS has a version for Macintosh nor do I know if the Macintosh Braille output can jump in and out of different translation tables (does anyone here switch from English to another human language and back using Braille?). There are other math packages: Mathematica, MathCAD for instance, that may have Macintosh versions but I know not if they support jumping in and out of the tactile systems like Nimith and DotsPlus. Ted Henter is actively working on his HenterMath program again but it will definitely not be done in time for your coursework this fall. I think that both Freedom Scientific and Humanware have low cost Nimith tutorials for PAC Mate and BrailleNote respectively. I've never used either so I can't not give a first hand endorsement but the one from FS grew out of the very popular Nimith tutorial sold (or was it given away) by Blazie back in the old days. I know of lots of people working on various aspects of handling math without vision. You might look up Art Carshmer, a professor at UC San Francisco, for whom math for blinks has been nearly his entire research career. There are others out there and, if you are interested, write to me off list and I can help you with introductions and such as the information above is nearly 100% of what I can recall about this subject on my first cup of coffee. Happy Hacking, cdh --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To post to this group, send email to macvisionaries@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
