Mathspeak: An Audio Method for Presenting Mathematical Formulae to Blind Students

This paper describes the problems involved with learning and understanding math for vision impaired students and developing a computer system approach for rendering mathematical formulae into audio form. Access to mathematics is an obstacle for blind students. The lack of easy access to mathematical...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Nazemi, Azadeh, Murray, Iain, Mohammadi, N.
Other Authors: IEEE PROFESSOR KOUHEI OHNISHI, FIEEE, FIEEJ
Format: Conference Paper
Published: The IEEE Computer Society Press 2012
Subjects:
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/36251
Description
Summary:This paper describes the problems involved with learning and understanding math for vision impaired students and developing a computer system approach for rendering mathematical formulae into audio form. Access to mathematics is an obstacle for blind students. The lack of easy access to mathematical resources is a barrier to higher education for many blind students and puts them at an unfair disadvantage in school, academia, and industry [1]. Results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress show that there is great disparity between the math skills of students with disabilities and students without disabilities [2]. A methodology for rendering technical documents, in particular, complex mathematical formula, in an audio descriptive form (Mathspeak) is presented in this paper.