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The student perspective

Accessible maths

Lilian Joy

Natalie Curran

Cordelia Webb

Lizzy Harrison

Ailsa Leck

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The problem

How lecturers want to produce content
How students want to use content and �their level of digital capability
Availability of the right infrastructure

Lilian

Here's the problem.

Lecturers want to produce content the way they want to produce content.

This can mean they're using R, LaTeX, Microsoft Office, Google Docs, chalkboards, paper and pen etc.

How easy it is for students to use the content in their own way relies on the documents being accessible in the first place, and whether students understand how to use different formats, in other words, their digital capabilities. This isn't something we can take for granted. Just because someone is disabled and expert at using their own tools doesn't mean they know how to use the formats lecturers have generated.

And of course, to create an eco-system that encourages the development and use of accessible maths requires the right infrastructure - we need the right tools, systems, workflows, communications and training to make it all happen.

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Natalie

Fig 1: The original set of lecture notes used for sighted students.

Fig 2: The compactified version produced with the online text editor for Natalie.

An accessible maths journey (preprint).

Natalie: As a maths student who cannot see, I need my maths to be formatted a particular way.

Screen reading technology does not pick up on formatting such as superscripts and subscripts and because braille can only be presented on a single line, I need the formatting to be conveyed in a symbolic way.

The top image shows traditional maths layout. The bottom image shows the same maths prepared for me to use with my braillenote but you’ll notice it’s equally accessible to both sighted and non-sighted readers.

For charts and graphs, I need visual data to be fully described for me to understand and engage with it.

Transcribing the lecturer’s materials is something Cordelia, the next speaker, does for me, although some tutors have learned to work with me by using unicode as illustrated on this slide. If you want to read more about the way I learn maths, and how Cordelia and the tutors prepare materials for me, you can read a story I wrote with them about our experiences and our processes: An accessible maths journey.

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In braille

Note how long the equation is on the bottom line. On a refreshable braille display, this means only a small part of the equation can be ‘read’ at a time.

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Cordelia - alternative formats

Universal design.

Having an accessible baseline helps with conversion:

Headings and formatted lists
Alt text
Meaningful hyperlinks
Tables with header row

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Cordelia - preparation

Be prepared to accommodate diverse student needs.

What works for one won’t necessarily work for another.

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Cordelia - Students use learning materials in diverse ways

Ask students!

Space for notes.

Choice of formats.

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Lizzy - Student skills

How to read or listen with a particular format.

How to notetake with a particular format.

How to create accessible documents.

How to describe images.

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Lizzy - including students

Reduce the individual burden on disabled students to self-advocate for modifications to existing material.

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Lizzy - Standardising materials

It can be difficult to continually adapt when course materials differ greatly from course to course.

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Ailsa - Peer support

Encourage peer support

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Ailsa - talk to more students

Students are experts in their own lived experiences.

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Links

Our University web page on accessible maths, user stories:�http://bit.ly/eaccess-equations2

The Jisc Accessible Maths working group:�Jisc A11ymaths github site