Statistical Software (R, SAS, SPSS, and Minitab) for Blind Students and Practitioners

Abstracts not available for SoftwareReview

Math in the Dark: Tools for Expressing Mathematical Content by Visually Impaired Students

Blind and visually impaired students are under-represented in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines of higher education and the workforce. This is due primarily to the difficulties they encounter in trying to succeed in mathematics courses. While there are sufficient tools available to create Braille content, including the special Nemeth Braille used in the U.S. for mathematics constructs, there are very few tools to allow a blind or visually impaired student to create his/her own mathematical content in a manner that sighted individuals can use. The software tools that are available are isolated, do not interface well with other common software, and may be priced for institutional use instead of individual use. Instructors are unprepared or unable to interact with these students in a real-time manner. All of these factors combine to isolate the blind or visually impaired student in the study of mathematics. Nemeth Braille is a complete mathematical markup system in Braille, containing everything that is needed to produce quality math content at all levels of complexity. Blind and visually impaired students should not have to learn any additional markup languages in order to produce math content. This work addressed the needs of the individual blind or visually impaired student who must be able to produce mathematical content for course assignments, and who wishes to interact with peers and instructors on a real-time basis to share mathematical content. Two tools were created to facilitate mathematical interaction: a Nemeth Braille editor, and a real-time instant messenger chat capability that supports Nemeth Braille and MathML constructs. In the Visually Impaired view, the editor accepts Nemeth Braille input, displays the math expressions in a tree structure which will allow sub-expressions to be expanded or collapsed. The Braille constructs can be translated to MathML for display within MathType. Similarly, in the Sighted view, math constructs entered in MathType can be translated into Nemeth Braille. Mathematical content can then be shared between sighted and visually impaired users via the instant messenger chat capability. Using Math in the Dark software, blind and visually impaired students can work math problems fully in Nemeth Braille and can seamlessly convert their work into MathML for viewing by sighted instructors. The converted output has the quality of professionally produced math content. Blind and VI students can also communicate and share math constructs with a sighted partner via a real-time chat feature, with automatic translation in both directions, allowing VI students to obtain help in real-time from a sighted instructor or tutor. By eliminating the burden of translation, this software will help to remove the barriers faced by blind and VI students who wish to excel in the STEM fields of study

Making Spatial Information Accessible on Touchscreens for Users who are Blind and Visually Impaired

Touchscreens have become a de facto standard of input for mobile devices as they most optimally use the limited input and output space that is imposed by their form factor. In recent years, people who are blind and visually impaired have been increasing their usage of smartphones and touchscreens. Although basic access is available, there are still many accessibility issues left to deal with in order to bring full inclusion to this population. One of the important challenges lies in accessing and creating of spatial information on touchscreens. The work presented here provides three new techniques, using three different modalities, for accessing spatial information on touchscreens. The first system makes geometry and diagram creation accessible on a touchscreen through the use of text-to-speech and gestural input. This first study is informed by a qualitative study of how people who are blind and visually impaired currently access and create graphs and diagrams. The second system makes directions through maps accessible using multiple vibration sensors without any sound or visual output. The third system investigates the use of binaural sound on a touchscreen to make various types of applications accessible such as physics simulations, astronomy, and video games

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 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

Accessibility Evaluation of Dubai e-Government Websites: Findings and Implications

Most governments today are promoting the transition of their countries towards an information society where e-Government websites are becoming the primary gateways to citizens and businesses for government information and eservice delivery. E-Government can be broadly defined as the unification of information and communication technologies, and administrative practices to provide government e-services to citizens, businesses and other e-Governments (Deakins and Dillon, 2002). The benefits of online government e-services include better efficiency, user convenience and more citizen political involvement (Freeman and Loo, 2009). To enable all citizens to benefit from the full potential of eGovernment services, it is important to secure universal accessibility. This accessibility enables persons with disabilities to take full advantage of the information and services offered by eGovernments; the same way a person with no disability would

Teaching Chemistry to Students with Disabilities: A Manual For High Schools, Colleges, and Graduate Programs - Edition 4.1

Ever since it was first published, Teaching Chemistry to Students with Disabilities: A Manual for High Schools, Colleges, and Graduate Programs has served as a vital resource in the chemistry classroom and laboratory to students with disabilities as well as their parents, teachers, guidance counselors, and administrators. The comprehensive 4th edition was last updated in 2001, so the American Chemical Society’s (ACS) Committee on Chemists with Disabilities (CWD) thought it prudent to update such a valuable text at this time. In a changing time of technology, rapid access to information, accessibility tools for individuals with disabilities, and publishing, Edition 4.1 is being published digitally/online as an Open Access text. Having Teaching Chemistry to Students with Disabilities: A Manual for High Schools, Colleges, and Graduate Programs in this format will allow for widespread dissemination and access by maximum numbers of readers at no cost- and will allow the text to remain economically sustainable.https://scholarworks.rit.edu/ritbooks/1001/thumbnail.jp

Re-Presenting Text in a Website for Visually Impaired Users using Braille Line

As new web technologies emerging and being adopted in the design of a website, web accessibility has become a major issue especially for people with disabilities .Limitation of assistive technology to render webpage has also been contributing factor for poor web accessibility by the visually impaired users. This issue has caused visually impaired users loss semantic information of webpage besides creating frustration situation of web browsing. In this paper, factors that cause web browsing frustration to the visually impaired users and types of tactile effects that can be implemented in the Braille Line device to render the semantic information of webpage are explored. The main objectives of this project is to build a website reader and program a Braille Line 20 cell device for web browsing focusing on presenting non visual text elements such as font attributes and text hierarchy that can be critical to meaning of the text. Tactile technology have been chosen to be adopted in the Braille Line as the touch is the most active sense of visually-impaired people to acquire knowledge .From the prototype to be build, a sample group of visually impaired users will be taken to test and evaluate the website and the device in terms of technology as well as its effectiveness. The results and recommendations were shared by the end of the project as a key milestone for future renditions of the project

Web Accessibility of the Higher Education Institute Websites Based on the World Wide Web Consortium and Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act

The problem observed in this study is the low level of compliance of higher education website accessibility with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. The literature supports the non-compliance of websites with the federal policy in general. Studies were performed to analyze the accessibility of fifty-four sample web pages using automated testing via auto-validation tools and using manual testing via assistive technology, followed by a comparative analysis of the findings of the auto validation tools. The auto-validation tools utilized on the sample web pages were comprised of three W3C validation tools. The results showed that two-thirds of the websites failed Priority 1 validation, while one hundred percent of the websites failed to meet the Priority 2 and Priority 3 validation. In addition, three web pages were tested against Section 508 guidelines. The result of the manual testing by assistive technology confirmed that all three websites failed to meet the minimum requirement of federal policy. Moreover, a comparative analysis between the validations of the W3C tools showed that significant differences existed between the findings of each auto-validation tool. The findings of this study implied that passing the evaluations of auto validation tools is not enough to ensure accessible websites to individuals with disabilities. It is important to utilize assistive tools to determine web accessibility as it appears to individuals with disabilities. Recommendations were made for improvements such as encouraging universities to provide training for website managers and implementing the mandatory use of screen-readers as a validation tool

Non-Visual Representation of Complex Documents for Use in Digital Talking Books

Essential written information such as text books, bills, and catalogues needs to be accessible by everyone. However, access is not always available to vision-impaired people. As they require electronic documents to be available in specific formats. In order to address the accessibility issues of electronic documents, this research aims to design an affordable, portable, standalone and simple to use complete reading system that will convert and describe complex components in electronic documents to print disabled users

A case study into the accessibility of text-parser based interaction.

The academic issues surrounding the accessibility of video games are reasonably well understood although compensations and inclusive design have not yet been comprehensively adopted by professional game developers. Several sets of guidelines have been produced to support developers wishing to ensure a greater degree of accessibility in their titles, and while the recommendations are broadly harmonious they only address the issues in isolation without being mindful of context or the subtle relationships between interaction choices and verisimilitude within game interfaces. That is not to denigrate the value of these resources, which is considerable -- instead it is to highlight a deficiency in the literature which can be addressed with reflective case studies. This paper represents one such case study, aimed at addressing accessibility concerns within interactive text interfaces. While the specifics of this paper are aimed at multiplayer text game accessibility improvements, it is anticipated that many of the lessons learned would be appropriate for any environment, such as command line interfaces, where the accessibility of written and read text is currently suboptimal