Mathscribe- Assistive technology for print disabled users?

Price: free! (no ads- $1.29)
iTunes link










Today i downloaded and assessed Mathscribe for the needs of low vision and print disabled users as a math notation program.

Mathscribe is a very sophisticated unicode math annotator for the ipad. It contains greek and hindu-arabic symbols as well as algebraic and trigonometric characters.  You can export the results into a rich text format- that means you can paste it into emails, word documents- anything you like which makes it a promising app for users who find notation with pen and paper difficult or want an easy to way to export math across digital sources that is cohesive and understood on multiple other systems and devices and of course- printers!

Math is not my forte but it looks like every character i can imagine is available in the keyboards various submenus.

Accessibility Limitations 
In regards to accessibility however, this application falls over in a few areas at this stage.

* You CAN adjust the font of the script to a ridiculously large size (N100)- but not the character buttons- and the font on the calculator is necessarily small due to all the functions made available. So it's not really great if you can't get a good look at N18 and this is not the sort of app you'll want to use the built in zoom for.

Like any keyboards though, if you love it you'll memorise it and then at least your working area can be enlarged so you don't have to use the zoom. But this makes for a steep learning curve- one thing that helps in this regard as that Algebraic and Trigonemetric keypads change the colour of their borders when selected- but not the keys- a missed opportunity there i feel.

Speech to Text
The math notation you create is unicode and can be voiced through speech or voiceover- but it won't voice things such as super or subscripts and only voices the unicode as it appears without making any inferences- so the math in my screenshot here reads as "Seventy Four therefore Fourty Seven"and pythagoras' theoreum is voiced as "a two equals b two plus c two".

This is the common failing point of text-to-speech engines reading math.

Voiceover compatibility
On ios 8.1 with voiceover on- this thing crashes all the time. When it doesn't crash there are serious navigation issues on the keyboard- the keyboard and dynamic keypad are the SAME element- so voiceover reads across the entire top row including the keypad in its scan. These really need to be navigated as separate elements to be accessible or useable.

This large keyboard is read by voiceover horizontally across the keyboard and keypad which makes it difficult to navigate.

Digital Braille
Sadly i don't at this stage have access to a digital braille display to test how this works in UEB but i suspect the issues with speech and voiceover carry over to digital braille.

Speech to text
No Speech-to-text or Siri compatibility is a missed opportunity in my opinion, but this is more an issue that Apple hasn't made Siri compatible with math notation then the fault of this noble free app.




Verdict 

There are some strong points as well for mathscribe in it's notation abilities for students with print disabilities that aren't vision related. It notates the math you type without solving it for you, which could be a selling point over soulver for high level notation and pedagogical purposes for teachers.  The contrasting colours of the keypad help to separate the functions on the keyboard visually. But all in all this clever app needs a bit of work before it can be effective assistive technology for users with print disabilities and i prefer the UI of Soulver personally.

CO-Writer, simple and powerful word processor for students with print disabilities.

price: $21.99

Application homepage: http://donjohnston.com/cowriter/#.VFQu6vmUcZk




This is one of my favourite literacy support apps for the creation of text and for reading. It has all of those highly desirable literacy support features and yet, it runs beautifully and has a really simple interface that is perfectly usable for even my most distractable students (once they've given the speech to text a run for its money by making it talk nonsense for a while, of course!)

There is a version for both american and british english (otherwise known as english) and the main difference is in the artificial voice and the spellchecker, both are of high quality.

At more than 20 dollars, this is not the sort of app one just buys to have a look at. So i've saved you the trouble and will give you a run down on how it works. I personally use the British English version as an Australian teacher.

The Title Screen

When you open the app you'll get a list of all the texts you have created or imported into CO-Writer these could be PDFS, copied text or created text. There are options here to rename and export writing to everything from facebook to email to iMessage- most of the time you will be resuming a text by clicking on it or pressing the new item button in the top right.















The Working interface

After you've created a new text or resumed a text from the title screen you'll come to a screen with your work, a keyboard with predictive text. The word prediction is customisable. You can use speech with the Siri key or word prediction to assist you in the construction of your passage.  Each word you type is spoken as you type or select it. Using this multisensory approach i've seen students comfortably create passages that they struggle with on pen and paper relatively quickly and it's very empowering for them and for me!

Phonetic Spellchecker and Word Prediction.

The spellchecker in CoWriter is geared towards mispellers- not mistypers like your average spellchecker. This means suggestions for corrections are based on the sounds or phonemes used rather then by assuming you know how to spell and have just missed a character!  You'll also notice in my screenshot that the word predictor has suggested a commonly used email address in my results- this is because Co-Writer's suggestions infer from your own writing style after a while!
Here is a little article which explains why COWRITERS word prediction and spellchecking algorithm is so sophisticated compared to more conventional types.

It guessed i was trying to spell "Knowledge" by looking at my phonemes- even though i missed the K- clever clever!

Speech to Text

Speech to text on CO-Writer BE can be configured for a male or female voice and both of these voices are very clear and easy to listen too. The rate of speech is adjustable. My only complaint is that the moving highlights- like the word prediction feature are NOT adjustable- my kids with low vision or glare issues are out of luck on this app for colour customisation. Boo!

Still great though if the blue highlights and words are easy for you or your student!

Customisation options

In no particular order- here are my favourite customisation options;

*Font size- up to Size N22. 

* Customisable fonts- Including San Serif fonts such as Tahoma!

* Pick between male and female voice

* Pick whether words or sentences are read out upon completion- or both!

* Speech rate

Topic dictionaries

Writing a paper and using scientific terms? Tell that to your word predictor and make life easy! The topic dictionaries span across KLA's- as well as being able to adjust for early,primary, secondary and tertiary language levels- a teacher or user can easily customise the word prediction so that the student will recieve suggestions appropriate to their topic- or just keep the settings on default and Co-Writer will just infer from the students writing style automatically.

Verdict

There are plenty of literacy enhancement softwares, and the IOS updates continue to enhance the basic apple experience with word prediction. However few softwares work as well as this and have such a simplicity of interface combined with such powerful options. Most importantly- the thing doesn't stutter when you import large documents- it is in actuality- highly usable and convenience for its purpose.

I have trialled many softwares with my students and amongst students who do not have vision concerns- this app is typically the favourite, it has everything a student needs to use voice, audio or word prediction to assist them in creating and reading content and supplies it in an intuitive manner, it also interfaces well with other applications so one can use it as a daily tool for everything from sms's to shopping lists to essays. Recommended for young and old!

my thoughts on readwritethink for aussie teachers

The American Scootle

ReadWriteThink is an american website that,much like the Australian Scootle, attempts to collate a wide variety of digital resources for teachers to use in the classroom, combining interactive resources, links to purchasable books and materials and lesson plans aligned to the US curriculum, ReadWriteThink in many ways accomplishes the ambitions set by the Australian Scootle, but with an alignment to the North American rather than Australian Curriculum.

Unlike Scootle however, ReadWriteThink is accessible to all teachers around the world and does not require a .gov or .edu sign-in to access, and so is available for Australian teachers to parse for resources.

Limitations  for Australian Teachers?

Any site that wishes to offer qualitative and peer reviewed resources aligned to a specific curriculum will necessarily suffer from a lack of resources and ReadWriteThink like Scootle currently suffers from this same problem. Whilst there are certain to be  useful lesson plans, interactive tools, and printouts that will be of use to teachers- the author of this article counted around 1190 resources available on ReadWriteThink in total- this includes all classroom resources, lesson plans and community stories (testimonials from teachers)- the vast majority of resources are lesson plans which will have to be appropriated to meet with Australian rather than American Curriculum standards.  


Verdict
Due to the small number of unique tools and resources offered by ReadWriteThink, particularly when one considers that Australian teachers will not be able to use many of these american resources due to localisation issues such as the US-centric themes of many lessons or the use of the imperial system for measuring; Teachers are more likely to use these teacher-resource sites like ReadWriteThink to parse for exercises and resources occasionally then to become regular users of the site as is intended, fortunately ireadwrite think features a powerful search and category browsing features that make this task easy to perform and is accessible by all teachers which boosts its usability and usefulness.  

my report of the ABA Round Table Conference 2013

my report of the ABA Round Table Conference 2013

From the 25th to the 29th of May  I attended the Annual Round Table Conference on Information Access for People with Print Disabilities.

There have been some fascinating developments in the world of braille and universal print access over the last year. Below are just a few that i found the most exciting! click here if you would like to read the chairpersons report for this year or any other year’s Roundtable meeting notes.

• The adoption of Universal English Braille Code by the Braille Authority of North America for print; this will mean we will see a higher availability of braille texts, converters and files from the United States, the world’s largest producer of Braille documents. Notably however, North America will continue to use the Nemeth Code for Mathematical and Scientific notation whilst Australia will continue to use UEB meaning we will not see the same level of uniformity when accessing for math and science texts as we will for print. For more news on the adoption of UEB by BANA, follow this link to a new article.

• Vision Australia has opened its library to people of all print disabilities; Vision Australia has been considered the principal service provider for Australian residents with blindness or low vision since its establishment in 2004. One of its notable services includes a library service which has been invaluable in providing people with low vision accessible books in electronic, braille and audio form (known as DAISY format) by mail or digitally to its clients. The Vision Australia library has now opened its digital doors to people of any print disability whether it arises from a physical, mental or perceptual disability.
  
   The process for signing up is simple and vision australia has very inclusive and flexible guidelines for joining up, even allowing special education teachers to act as referees for their students with print disabilities! Here is a link for more information on the Vision Australia Library Service and how to join, additionally, here is a link to the online library catalogue so you can browse for your students.
  

• Operating System accessibility revolution. With Windows 8 and Android 4.2 taking their lessons from the IOS and MAC operating systems,  all of these modern mainstream operating systems for phones and computers now tout a high degree of ‘out of the box’ usability and accessibility by vision impaired users, although i wouldn’t be turning in my copy of JAWS or bricking my iphone just yet, Windows 8 and Android devices are a far cry from where they were in 2012 in regards to accessibility without third party apps.
  
       Windows 8 accessibility features and how to use them

               Android 4.2 accessibility features and how to use them

               Mac O/S accessibility features and how to use them   

               IOS accessibility features and how to use them

• EPUB 3 becomes the new standard for ebook developers.

The new open source format for Ebooks is called EPUB3 and it features richer format cohesion, editing features and HTML markup which will make the format much easier to navigate for blind people with assistive technologies, and even offer people with print disabilties an ebook that is marked up with spoken rather then synthetic text.

This highly editable and accessible format  has become the format of choice by publishers, developer and users to the chagrin of copyright holders and format giants such as Amazon and Apple who would like to keep their proprietary formats mutually exclusive to their devices and natively published using in-house tools.  The benefits of this format for people with print disabilities is that this format uses a code that is very easy to make universally accessible and follows a similar language to both the DAISY and HTML 5 format- making this format both universally accessible and easy to make as long as established  guidelines are followed in the creation of the ebook. Click here for more information on EPUB3 and accessibility guidelines.

• Fascinating developments in digital braille may give us a way to give our vision impaired students unprecedented access to full pages of refreshable braille and diagrams that give auditory and tactile information.

Digital refreshable braille is a fantastic thing, but for the last thirty years refreshable braille technology has seen little advancement in engineering, all using the same technology of tiny clusters of actuators pushing little plastic pins through a  plastic sleeve to represent braille characters,  as such braille displays have never been able to provide more than one line of refreshable braille for anything under a few thousand dollars.

Over the last few years there have been some exciting developments in refreshable braille technology which hope to provide low vision users with a full page of refreshable braille- this will be invaluable in providing blind users with a dynamic readable format for complicated diagrams, charts, pictures as well as representing text and document layout in a more readable way.

Below are just three recent and promising technologies with relevant articles attached

Project Gravvitas Project Gravvitas is a new touchscreen project developed at Monash University for blind users for digital tactile diagram, this project combines an electronic haptic (vibrating) glove, with an ipad and some headphones for directional audio input to give people access to specially colour coded diagrams. Here is a link for information on the The GraVVITAS project

EAP Refreshable Braille

A prototype of a low cost electronic braille device was developed in 2010 by the Boston Centre for Braille Innovation which uses a new technology called Electroactive Polymer Technology (EAP Technology). These EAP devices use a remarkably different technology from traditional braille displays in that uses a device which reads a film that instructs the device to pneumatically raise individual dots as the device reads information from a film. This link contains more information on this technology and its development.

  

         

Liquid Refreshable BrailleCalifornia tech-based company Tactus have been working since 2007 to design tablets for the mainstream market that feature a liquid display that allows the tablet to present raised or tactile features- principally, this technology is designed for a mainstream audience to enjoy the use of dynamic tactile user interfaces such as keyboards and program-specific controls, but recent research indicates that this technology will also be a boon to the blind, allowing these tablets to output braille code and diagrams as well.  

The most promising aspect of this technology for me is that it is geared towards mainstream consumption which means that if it does become available it will not have the prohibitive costs attached to it as other technologies specifically designed for a low vision and blind audience.

Links Below.

Follow this link for an article on the tactus tablet
Follow this link for an academic article on the use of this technology to create refreshable braille

Some great tools for creating accessible documentshttp://makeitaccessible.com.au/  - this is still in a beta phase, but it’s a service that allows you to upload documents and convert them into a more accessible format.http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/upsize/guide.html- Upsize for word 2010 is a plugin for MS word designed by the University of Auckland to create accessible clearprint documents.Tidbit
the ABA has published all its documents for regular consumption in font Tahoma, font 14. This blog post is in Tahoma, you will note the ease of reading and absence of serifs which make the font a preferable font for publishing easy to read documents or websites (or worksheets!).

Thankyou for reading my post!