A Blind Math User Story

Summary

A user story is a description of a system, from the point of view of a user of the system. Here give the user story of an engineering college student who is blind.

For background see User Stories and Acccessibility. Every Thursday (18:30 to 19:30 UK time) there's a zoom TeX Hour. Details here.

Once upon a time …

This month on the Blind Math list Kellee Sanchez wrote

Hello! We have a student in higher level math class, aerodynamics to be exact, and the online book is not accessible. There are many people working on a viable avenues to get the student their book before the semester ends, but it is looking bleak.

Does anyone have suggestions how to get the book into MML? Also, what can I do when this occurs again? Who can I contact? The book is Fundamentals of Aerodynamics 6th ed. By JD Anderson. Thank you for any assistance you can give!

… and there was progress

The following day Kellee wrote

Thank you all for all of the information and new-found motivation to speak up about inaccessible books and how to move in a proactive direction. The information provided by @Nikita was very helpful for my journey.

I downloaded Mathpix, used the screenshot tool to paste it to Word doc and lo’ and behold the Focus40 was able to pick up the image correctly as well as VoiceOver on the MacBook and JAWS. However, from my very limited knowledge of Mathpix, a screen reader user would be unsuccessful without sighted assistance.

If anyone else here has used Mathpix more frequently and has thoughts I would be grateful to read about them!

The whole story

Every good story has characters, twists, turns and human drama. Are you a developer of mathematics accessibility software? If so perhaps you should read the whole story, from beginning to end.

Perhaps in this user story there's something that helps you create better software. Software that works better for people who have a disability.

You can read the whole story, about 25 messages here