Making Math Accessible

White House event: STEM Equality For Americans With Disabilities

Steve Noble, Accessibility Research Consultant (Guest Writer)

It was a distinct privilege to be among the hundred-plus people in the audience yesterday as the White House recognized fourteen people for their contributions toward advancing access to Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) for people with disabilities. The event, Champions of Change: STEM Equality For Americans With Disabilities was the latest in the “Champions of Change” series which recognizes leaders in various fields across the county and brings them to the White House “to share their ideas to win the future.”

According to Kareem Dale, special assistant to President Barack Obama for disability policy, “The leaders we’ve selected as Champions of Change are proving that when the playing field is level, people with disabilities can excel in STEM, develop new products, create scientific inventions, open successful businesses and contribute equally to the economic and educational future of our country.” Mr. Dale, who is blind himself, pointed out the importance of providing an equal opportunity in the STEM fields to people with disabilities, and that “there’s nothing that we can’t do as people with disabilities when given that equal opportunity.”

I was delighted to see friends being honored whom I have known for quite some time--like George Kerscher of the DAISY Consortium and Virginia Stern of AAAS, as well as a number of younger people just starting their careers whom I had never met before. It was especially encouraging to see a number of successful graduate students with disabilities who are distinguishing themselves in the STEM fields, something which is certainly a testimony to Kareem Dale’s affirmation about the ability of people with disabilities to excel when given an equal opportunity.

I thought it would be fitting to add just a few special comments about four individuals recognized at the White House who have a special connection to making math accessible.

George Kerscher serves as Secretary General of the DAISY Consortium and President of the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF). George and I have worked together in the field for over two decades--since his days running what was then called Computerized Books for the Blind. Kareem Dale introduced George as “a legend in his own right”, and I couldn’t agree more. George brought our own Neil Soiffer on board to chair the MathML in DAISY Working Group, for which George was a member and key contributor. Over the years, George has been instrumental in ensuring that accessible math is a component of digital document standards, like DAISY and EPUB 3. 

During the event, John Boyer mentioned that as a deaf-blind student in the 1940s he could not find enough STEM materials in braille to satisfy his hunger for science, and that this experience led him to work on braille translation systems which could better handle mathematics. John’s previous work on liblouis and his current BrailleBlaster translation technology are examples of open source products which include the capability to translate MathML into to various braille math codes. Design Science has been involved with John’s work and we’ll be using it as part of MathPlayer 3's braille support for refreshable braille displays.

Sina Birham, a blind graduate student at North Carolina State University, is an up and coming star and soon will be getting his PhD in computer science. Sina is working with us on adding math expression navigation to a future version of MathPlayer.

Steve Jacobs, President of the IDEAL Group, is someone I have known for years, having served together as co-presenters on sessions and members of committees. Steve has worked to spread the news about accessible math and his company has worked to produce a number of applications which help to make STEM content more accessible to people with disabilities.

Of course, these are just a few of the Champions honored by the White House. We would like to enthusiastically congratulate all the Champions, and recognize their accomplishments in the STEM fields. The White House is certainly to be commended for its efforts at drawing attention to this vital issue.

 

Steve Noble is a research consultant with a core focus in mathematics accessibility and assistive technology. Currently he serves on grant-funded research projects with both the University of Kentucky and Bridge Multimedia, and previously served as Director of Accessibility Policy for Design Science.

Joint statement on accessibility & e-books

Steve Noble, Accessibility Research Consultant (Guest Writer)

Last week at the London Book Fair, the UK Publishers Association (PA) launched a Joint statement on accessibility & e-books, pledging support of the publishing industry to foster greater accessibility of e-books. The PA--a leading trade organization of publishers in the UK—was joined in support of this statement by other key organizations, including the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) and EDItEUR, the international standards organization for the book industry. 

The joint statement advances the premise that “publishers can work towards ensuring that all their ebooks have easily added features that assist accessibility (like enhanced navigation); and equally that their ebooks do not have accessibility features unnecessarily disabled.” It further promotes that the PA intends on working together with the developers of ebook devices and platforms, the actors in the supply chain for ebooks, people with print impairments, and learning providers and libraries to ensure accessible ebooks to all.

The PA is certainly to be applauded for their stance. Although the joint statement does not specifically address access to mathematics content, we all need to remember that using accessible math in all forms of digital content is vital to ensuring that people with disabilities will have the same level of accessibility to ebooks containing math as they do to standard literary text.

Those of us in the USA can learn a few things from the Brits. Wouldn’t it be great to see the Association of American Publishers and the Authors’ Guild come out with a similar stance encouraging its members not to disable text to speech capabilities and supporting full accessibility to ebook content?  Take a moment to contact these organizations and urge them to adopt a similar pledge:

• AAP -- info@publishers.org
• Authors Guild -- staff@authorsguild.org

As the joint statement points out, accessibility depends upon all the parts of the supply chain. So also be sure to make your voice known to ebook vendors, ebook reader developers, and your school and library…all the parts of the ebook chain. Everyone needs to know about the importance of making math accessible.

For some more ideas about what you can do to make math accessible in your community, see What can you do to help promote math accessibility? 

Steve Noble is a research consultant with a core focus in mathematics accessibility and assistive technology. Currently he serves on grant-funded research projects with both the University of Kentucky and Bridge Multimedia, and previously served as Director of Accessibility Policy for Design Science.

Subversion Cheat Sheet

This Subversion cheat sheet was created during the initial setup of Subversion on Apache 2.0 on Windows and Mac OS X. A detailed tutorial covering most of the features of Subversion can be found in the online Subversion book. However, to make Subversion more useful for me, I created this Readers' Digest version.

Create a Repository

To store projects in Subversion, first you must create a repository. This must be done to a local drive on a local machine. Creating a repository on a network drive is not supported. To create a repository type:

UNIX

svnadmin create /path/to/repository

Windows

svnadmin create d:/path_to_repository

By default this sets up a Berkeley database to store the repository. Individual projects should be created as subdirectories of the repository directory (see the next section). Notice that the Windows version includes a drive letter, but also uses forward slashes instead of back slashes. The forward slashes are required even on Windows.

Add a New Project - svn import

To add a project, the Subversion documentation suggests that you create a directory structure like the following:

A root project directory contains three subdirectories, branches, tags, and trunk. Your files and directories are stored under the trunk directory.

Create the directories as described. Assuming the project directory is a subdirectory of the current directory, you would enter the following command

UNIX

svn import project file:///repository_name/project -m "First Import"

Windows

svn import project file:///d:/repository_name/project -m "First Import"

Network

svn import project http://host_name/svn_dir/repository_name/project -m "First Import"

Notice the Network example includes an svn_dir. This assumes you are using Apache 2.0 and the Subversion modules. When setting up Subversion on Apache, a virtual directory is created on the server that points to your repository directory. More information on Apache 2 setup is described later in this document.

This creates the initial project which you can work from. To get the files under version control, you must checkout a project to begin working on it.

Checking Out a Project - svn checkout

To start using the version control features check out a project into your local working directory. This is done with the following command:

UNIX

svn checkout file:///repository_name/project/trunk project

Windows

svn checkout file:///d:/repository_name/project/trunk project

Network

svn checkout http://host_name/svn_dir/repository_name/project/trunk project

In these examples, project is the name of the directory where you want to store the checked out project on your local file system.

Getting a List of Projects - svn list

To get a list of the current projects stored in a repository, you can use the following command.

UNIX

svn list --verbose file:///repository_name/project

Network

svn list --verbose http://host_name/svn_dir/repository_name/project

This will show you a list of each project directory in that repository.

Reviewing Changes - svn status

To see what files you have changed or added to your checked out work, use the update command:

UNIX

svn status

This command will give you a listing of new files, files that have been changed, and files that have been deleted. New files or deleted files must be added or removed using the add and delete commands (see more below.)

Adding New Files and Directories - svn add

When you add a new file or directory to a project that has been checked out, you must tell Subversion to include that file or directory in its version control.

UNIX

svn add file_or_dir_name

Adding a directory will add the directory and all the files and directories in it. However, this does not add the file or directory to the repository, you must still issue a commit to update the repository.

Deleting Files and Directories - svn delete

If you can add, you can also delete. If you wish to remove a file your directory from be versioned, you use the delete command:

UNIX

svn delete file_or_dir_name

Like add, you must perform a commit before the file is actually deleted from the repository.

However, the delete command does have another option not found in add. With the delete command you can remove files or directories from the repository. For example, the following command would remove a project and all the files under it.

Network

svn delete -m "Deleting project dir" http://localhost/svn_dir/repository/project_dir

This version of the command comes in particulary useful if someone has accidently imported files into the wrong place (I wouldn't know about that myself of course.)

Committing Changes - svn commit

Once you have added, deleted, or changed files or directories, you can then commit those changes to the repository. This command is pretty straightforward:

Network

svn commit -m "Saving recent changes" http://localhost/svn_dir/repository/project_dir

Updating Your Local Files - svn update

If you have a set of files checked out and would like to update them to the most recent version of files in the repository, use the update command.

Network

svn update

If there are newer files in the repository, they will overwrite any files you have locally. Before using this command, you may want to use the svn diff command to find out what the differences are between your local files and the repository.

Tagging Projects or Creating Project Specific Versions

Subversion does not track the version numbers for individual projects automatically. Instead, it tracks each update to the repository and tracks the versions of these updates. To create interim project releases, you must create "Tags" which identify a specify version of a project. This is done by making a virtual copy of a project in the tags directory. For example:

svn copy http://host_name/repos/project/trunk http://host_name/repos/project/tags/0.1.0 -m "Tagging the 0.1.0 release of the project"

This creates a sort of bookmark or snapshot which records the current state of the project. Then, you can checkout the project in this state at any time by simply referring to that release number.

To get a list of the releases for a project.

svn list http://192.168.0.4/svn/repos/prj1/tags
0.1.0/

Then to check out a release you would type:

svn list http://192.168.0.4/svn/repos/prj1/tags/0.1.0


A  0.1.0\dir1
A  0.1.0\dir1\file3
A  0.1.0\dir1\file4
A  0.1.0\file1
A  0.1.0\file2
A  0.1.0\textfile.txt
A  0.1.0\file3
		Checked out revision 13.
		

Since the project has been saved in the tags directory. Release 0.1.0 can be retrieved at any time in the future.

Basic Apache Setup

You must use Apache 2.0 to install Subversion. Just compile and copy or copy the Subversion Apache module into the Apache modules directory. The following two files must be uncommented or added to the httpd.conf file:

		LoadModule dav_module         modules/mod_dav.so
		LoadModule dav_svn_module     modules/mod_dav_svn.so
		

Next, you must setup a location directive in the httpd.conf file to associate a directory with Subversion repositories. This example uses the SVNParentPath setting to point to a parent directory which contains repository subdirectories. This is convenient as it allows you to add as many repositories as you need without having to restart Apache or modify the httpd.conf file.

		<Location /svn>
			DAV svn
			
			# All repos subdirs of d:/svn
			SVNParentPath D:/svn
		</Location>
		

Note:When using Fink to install Subversion on Mac OS X, the Subversion Apache module is stored in the Fink package listing with the prefix: libapache2. The package full name is libapache2-mod-svn. If you are using Fink, it will automatically install the modules into the correct directory.

General Notes

Below are a list of notes from initial setup and testing.

• Subversion versions the repository, not individual projects. For example, I have two projects, project 1 and project 2, and check out each project when the current repository version is 3. I make changes to each project and commit those changes back to the repository. For each change, the revision number is incremented in the repository and its current version is now 5. The current revision of each project will also be 5 as they have no separate revision number.
• To setup the Subversion module on Apache for Windows, I had to give the Apache Service access to the local file system. This is done on Windows by setting up a login account for the service. Setup an account in the Users application in Control Panel, make sure to set the password. Once this is done, go to the Services tool in Control Panel. Change the login for the Service to the account you created. XP will automatically give the Login as a Service privilege to the account (the OS must do this as the tools are not available XP Home, only in XP Pro). Once you do this and start and stop the Apache Service, you should be able to read and write to the repository directories. Note: Setting up a log in account for a Service can create a security hole. Consider your security requirements before doing this.
• Individual files and directories that did not exist during the initial import, must be added individually using the svn add command.

When will they stop ignoring students with disabilities?

Steve Noble, Accessibility Research Consultant (Guest Writer)

Earlier this week, a new report from a blue-ribbon panel convened by the Council on Foreign Relations sounded the alarm that U.S. schools are failing to prepare enough scientists, mathematicians, and engineers needed to promote continuing national prosperity and global leadership. The report, “U.S. Education Reform and National Policy,” specifically cites that many students "are growing up deficient in vital math skills, including knowledge of number properties and operations, measurement, geometry, data analysis, statistics, probability, and algebra."

One issue of concern which seldom gets raised in such discussions--and is not mentioned at all in this report--is the fact that students with disabilities typically score at the bottom of the pack in math and science, and rarely go on to get advanced degrees in these fields. There are many underlying causes which contribute to this problem, but one critical issue which is often overlooked is the fact that science and math educational materials in our schools are not accessible to students with disabilities. Getting the education community to take note and demand that educational content is created (by textbook publishers and others) in accessible digital formats can help to open new doors for all students—both students with learning or visual disabilities, as well as struggling students without disabilities who simply don’t connect with print textbooks and chalk boards. Contact your State Department of Education and local school district. Make sure they know how important it is that all students have equal access to math and make sure they require math accessibility in textbook adoption and software selection policies.

For more ways you can get involved check out, What can you do to help promote math accessibility?

Steve Noble is a research consultant with a core focus in mathematics accessibility and assistive technology. Currently he serves on grant-funded research projects with both the University of Kentucky and Bridge Multimedia, and previously served as Director of Accessibility Policy for Design Science.

A sad day

I am extremely sad to report that Robert Miner, Design Science's VP of Research & Development, passed away this morning from liver cancer. I have worked closely with Robert for about 15 years and considered him a close personal friend. Our condolences go out to his wife and son. We will all miss him greatly.

MathPlayer 3 Preview Release 1 is now available!

MathPlayer™ is our free plug-in for Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) that displays mathematical notation in web pages using MathML, the W3C standard. It also makes math accessible to readers with vision and learning disabilities. Four years ago, MathPlayer 2 broke new ground by making math accessible. Since then, over 12 million expressions have been spoken using assistive technology such as screen readers and screen magnifiers.

We've been hard at work on version 3.0 of MathPlayer. Since the current version of MathPlayer does not support Internet Explorer 9.0, and the new version does, we've decided to make MathPlayer 3.0 available now as Preview Release 1. We expect to add more features in subsequent releases, but Preview Release 1 already has a lot of powerful enhancements:

• Support for Internet Explorer 9 (IE 10 is not yet supported)
• Support for HTML 5.
• Full support for MathML 3:
  • Linebreaks: control over linebreaks and the indentation that follows
  • Elementary math: markup that allows description of elementary math notations such as stacked addition (with carries) and long division
  • Right-to-left math: support for right-to-left notation for math used in Arabic countries
• New accessibility features:
  • Disability targeting. Different reading-related learning disabilities require specialized approaches for reading math. MathPlayer 3 gives you the ability to chose between "Blind", "Low Vision", and "Learning Disabilities".
  • Improved speech. We've added hundreds of special cases to improve how math is spoken.
  • Multi-language support for math-to-speech. The following languages are supported in this preview release:  Chinese, Czech, Dutch, English, Finnish, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Spanish, and Swedish.  We expect to have support for more languages in the final release.  If you would like to help out and provide a translation for another language, please contacts us.
  • Subject area targeting. Choose speech tailored to the type of math being displayed.  This release currently supports, Geometry, Probability & Statistics, and Calculus are supported.  The next preview release will allow authors to embed these setting directly in the document.
  • Speech style options: Choose between SimpleSpeak -- designed to speak in a short, familiar, and unambiguous (for blind users)  manner or MathSpeak™ -- designed to speak in a manner that is similar to Nemeth code so that braille users can easily write the braille equivalent when they hear it.
  • Refreshable braille support. The ability to generate braille for a refreshable braille display. Please contact your screen reader vendor to see what their plans are to support this feature.

If you'd like to give it a try, please visit the MathPlayer download page and give us feedback about what you do and don't like. If for some reason, you find problems that gets in the way of your work, you can easily uninstall MathPlayer 3 and reinstall the older version of MathPlayer.