Abstract
Several systems have been developed that allow mathematical expressions to be spoken and navigated. This paper describes studies involving the latest revision of the most widely used system: MathPlayer 4. This version includes features to allow navigation of mathematical expressions. Students with blindness or low vision used NVDA + MathPlayer to read Microsoft Word documents with math problems in them. The results were compared with the same students reading similar documents using their favorite modality (braille or large print). The results showed that speech augmented with navigation resulted in similar comprehension rates compared to when students used their preferred modality. This is an important finding because electronic documents are often available in situations where braille or large print documents are not.
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Notes
- 1.
This is not ambiguous because “over” is only used when the denominator is simple.
- 2.
Nemeth refreshable braille is also supported by NVDA + MathPlayer, but the study did not allow students to use this feature.
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Acknowledgements
The study portion of the grant was carried out by Lois Frankel and Beth Brownstein at ETS. I am very thankful for their expertise in designing the study questions and hard work in getting IRB approval, lining up the students, and evaluating the results. Some tutorial material and student recruitment was carried out by Stephen Noble.
I had many late night discussions with Sina Bahram about how navigation should work. Many ideas were discussed and rejected until we came to the current design. The design was very much a joint effort.
The research reported here was supported by the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, through Grant R324A110355 to the Educational Testing Service and Design Science. The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent views of the Institute or the U.S. Department of Education.
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Soiffer, N. (2016). A Study of Speech Versus Braille and Large Print of Mathematical Expressions. In: Miesenberger, K., Bühler, C., Penaz, P. (eds) Computers Helping People with Special Needs. ICCHP 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9758. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-41264-1_8
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