Student-centred approaches in Mathematics

Student-centred approaches in Mathematic

Using Markup Languages for Accessible Scientific, Technical, and Scholarly Document Creation

In using software to write a scientific, technical, or other scholarly document, authors have essentially two options. They can either write it in a ‘what you see is what you get’ (WYSIWYG) editor such as a word processor, or write it in a text editor using a markup language such as HTML, LaTeX, Markdown, or AsciiDoc. This paper gives an overview of the latter approach, focusing on both the non-visual accessibility of the writing process, and that of the documents produced. Currently popular markup languages and established tools associated with them are introduced. Support for mathematical notation is considered. In addition, domain-specific programming languages for constructing various types of diagrams can be well integrated into the document production process. These languages offer interesting potential to facilitate the non-visual creation of graphical content, while raising insufficiently explored research questions. The flexibility with which documents written in current markup languages can be converted to different output formats is emphasized. These formats include HTML, EPUB, and PDF, as well as file formats used by contemporary word processors. Such conversion facilities can serve as means of enhancing the accessibility of a document both for the author (during the editing and proofreading process) and for those among the document’s recipients who use assistive technologies, such as screen readers and screen magnifiers. Current developments associated with markup languages and the accessibility of scientific or technical documents are described. The paper concludes with general commentary, together with a summary of opportunities for further research and software development

Axessibility: a LaTeX Package for Mathematical Formulae Accessibility in PDF Documents

Accessing mathematical formulae within digital documents is challenging for blind people. In particular, document formats designed for printing, such as PDF, structure math content for visual access only. While accessibility features exist to present PDF content non-visually, formulae support is limited to providing replacement text that can be read by a screen reader or displayed on a braille bar. However, the operation of inserting replacement text is left to document authors, who rarely provide such content. Furthermore, at best, description of the formulae are provided. Thus, conveying detailed understanding of complex formulae is nearly impossible. In this contribution we report our ongoing research on Axessibility, a LATEX package framework that automates the process of making mathematical formulae accessible by providing the formulae LATEX code as PDF replacement text. Axessibility is coupled with external scripts to automate its integration in existing documents, expand user shorthand macros to standard LATEX representation, and custom screen reader dictionaries that improve formulae reading on screen readers

PDF Accessibility of Research Papers: What Tools are Needed for Assessment and Remediation?

Trillions of documents online are in PDF format, but only a small amount of these PDF documents include the necessary markup to make them accessible for people with disabilities. This paper presents the results of three related data collection efforts: a survey (with 61 participants), interviews (with 6 participants), and usability testing (with 6 participants), to learn more about what tools are needed for content contributors, to assist them in the assessment and remediation of accessibility in PDF documents. The paper provides suggested features and usability needed for software tools to support PDF document accessibility, as well as implications for content creators, scientific publishers, as well as the creator of the PDF format, Adobe

The launch of Seismica: a seismic shift in publishing

Seismica, a community-run Diamond Open Access (OA) journal for seismology and earthquake science, opened for submissions in July 2022. We created Seismica to support a shift to OA publishing while pushing back against the extreme rise in the cost of OA author processing charges, and the inequities this is compounding. Seismica is run by an all-volunteer Board of 47 researchers who fulfil traditional editorial roles as well as forming functional teams to address the needs for technical design and support, copy editing, media and branding that would otherwise be covered by paid staff at a for-profit journal. We are supported by the McGill University Library (Québec, Canada), who host our website and provide several other services, so that Seismica does not have any income or financial expenditures. We report the process of developing the journal and explain how and why we made some of the major policy choices. We describe the organizational structure of the journal, and discuss future plans and challenges for the continued success and longevity of Seismica

ModelMaker, a Multidisciplinary Web Application to Build Question Generator Models From Basic to Higher Education

PmatE (Mathematics and Education Project) is a Research and Development project started in 1989 at the University of Aveiro, Portugal. For 27 years, PmatE has maintained the mission of applying technologies and developing content and events to foster school success and scientific culture. PmatE provides a large repository of learning objects, with particular emphasis in Question Generator Models (QGM) or simply Models. A QGM is an object for generating questions targeting specific scientific and pedagogical-didactic objectives. Each QGM generates thousands of different questions, thus enabling the exposure of students to the same core problems, but with different instantiations, preventing cheating in exams. The QGM’s are the basis of Portugal National Science Competitions (NSC), a three-day yearly event with about ten thousand participants, and are widely used by schools nationwide, at various levels of education (from basic to higher education), for test and diagnostic exams in several areas (e.g., Mathematics, Physics, Biology, Portuguese, Financial Education, Geosciences and Chemistry). Until September 2015, each QGM created was written in a LaTeX template, as an intermediate specification of the Model, and later implemented by dedicated programmers from PmatE, thus making the Model development and later corrections a tedious, lengthy and time-consuming task. This work presents PmatE ModelMaker solution, which enables professors with neither a coding background nor latex knowledge, from basic school to higher education from all areas mentioned above, to create and share QGMs through a Web application. ModelMaker, keeps the core concepts of QGM such as “boxes” and “variables”, in order to guarantee the random screens concretization, and incorporates new functionalities and advantages (e.g., autonomy, model versioning, storage of instantiated models, and a management optimization of PmatE Subject Classification). Application ModelMaker, developed in ASP.NET, with SQL databases and Javascript frameworks, has proven to be a successful tool for saving time and giving total autonomy to QGM authors in the creation of the last 134 models in several areas of knowledge, as evidenced by the usage statistics extracted during the last eight months since the application has been available. This improvement in the QGMs development methodology is an important mark in the history of PmatE

Responsive inclusive design (RiD): a new model for inclusive software development.

The design and development of technological solutions based on software for all types of people, including people with disabilities, is still a pending issue in most software application development projects today. Situations like the 2020 pandemic drastically reflect how people with disabilities tend to be left outside the application design and construction guidelines. There are multiple initiatives and previous works that advocate user involvement from the beginning of the project; however, in this work, we go a step further by presenting a model for designing and constructing software applications (RiD—Responsive inclusive Design) defined for inclusive software. RiD extends the involvement of the user with disabilities to the entire software life cycle, in different roles, and taking into account the changing nature of the user profile in the evolution of the product. This article also presents the EDICO case study, an accessible and inclusive scientific editor for the Spanish National Organization of the Blind (ONCE), which was successfully implemented applying the RiD principles.post-print1229 k