DR. DENISE ROBINSON:
Because you have to think bigger than sight.
OLEG SHEVKUN:
Dr. Denise Robinson discusses math, career and education.
OLGA ESPINOLA:
With respect to braille and with respect to how the screen readers handle speech, it's not quite so simple.
OLEG SHEVKUN:
But Olga Espinola is making our new math features simple. All this and more on FSCast episode 248.
I'm Oleg Shevkun, welcoming you to this back-to-school issue of FSCast. And first of all, thank you to all who have written in on our Fscast@vispero.com address. Please keep your emails coming in. I do hope to have a special email section later, probably in September or October. But today on our back-to-school issue, we've got lots of things to cover. We've got lots of stuff that is going to be exciting, but before all of that, the cool stuff is where you can take part in something and where you can also get some prizes, potentially. And we have Rachel Buchanan, our Director of Training here at Vispero, to tell us about stuff that's really going to thrill some of us, those of us who are eligible, but we'll find out more.
OLEG:
Hello Rachel, and welcome to the show.
RACHEL:
Hi Oleg, thanks for having me. And before you get into the meat of this episode, I do just want to share about these events coming up, which you may remember last year we celebrated the month of November as Sharkvember. And it was really fun, we had a lot of events to celebrate JAWS and the community of people who use our software, and we are going to do that again this year. And so be looking out for all those events coming up in Sharkvember, right after our annual release.
But even before then, we will be taking submissions for our Next Big Thing contest. Now if you don't remember what it is, last year we held this contest as well. The grand prize winner was Abby Duffy, and she did win with her submission for the idea for Picture Smart AI, which is a feature that has been a huge part of 2024, something we're still excited about, still making improvements to, and people are just really excited about that. So, thank you Abby. And the submissions for the next Next Big Thing contest will be opening up on September 5th, 2024, and they will be open until October 16th, 2024.
OLEG:
Are there any rules to that? Any guidelines or anything we should be aware of?
RACHEL:
There are. Again, this year we're only taking submissions from the US, the UK and Australia. That is a bummer for those who may be listening outside of those countries. We are sorry, this is all because of legal regulations and not because we are trying to play favorites. If you head over to freedomscientific.com/nextbigthing, you can read all of the contest terms and conditions. You can also submit your idea there.
OLEG:
Anything else in November that we need to be aware of? Anything that we might want to put on our calendars?
RACHEL:
Definitely be watching out for that September 5th date when submissions open up and you can submit your idea for the Next Big Thing. Also in November, we are going to be doing a collab webinar with Dan Clark on November 12th, and we also have another FS Open Line coming up. It's going to be a busy packed month. We have a lot of other events planned, so definitely please participate. We'd love to have you engage with us. And I just want to mention the prizes real quick, because everybody loves a prize. So for our grand prize winner this year, again, we will be doing the $1,000 Amazon gift card, and we will be doing Amazon gift cards for our runner up ideas as well. So we will take our top three ideas, feature them at the Next Big Thing event, which will be happening on November 19th, 2024 at 7:00 PM Eastern.
OLEG:
That's pretty cool. And also while we're at it, Rachel, let us remind our listeners about the podcasts that are produced by the training department.
RACHEL:
Absolutely. We have several different ways that we repurpose our training material, either on our podcast feed, which is Freedom Scientific Training, and you can listen to that wherever you get podcasts. Also on your smart home devices, by just saying the wake word followed by "Play The Freedom Scientific Training podcast." And we also repurpose that training info on YouTube. Our channel is Freedom Scientific Training.
OLEG:
Thank you, Rachel. We're looking forward to Sharkvember.
RACHEL:
Well, thank you for having me Oleg, and I look forward to hearing this full episode.
OLEG:
How do you use technology to teach math, and in general, what's the connection between technology, teaching and career? To discuss these and other questions, we're joined today by Dr. Denise Robinson, an access technology instructor, a successful business owner, and a truly enthusiastic person. Hello Denise, and welcome to FSCast.
DENISE:
Oh, thank you very much, Oleg. How are you doing?
OLEG:
Doing very well, Denise. How about you?
DENISE:
I'm doing just splendiferous.
OLEG:
Let me start with a very direct question. Is it true that in some countries, if you're blind, you may be allowed to skip math classes?
DENISE:
Believe it or not, and it is very sad. I've heard a few occasions, and it's mostly in the higher ed, college level, and the students didn't learn math to begin with or a lot of tech skills in their K through 12 education or the lower education. And so the colleges will come up with other work for them to do that really is not even really math related, to get credit for it. Now in general, well if there are students, they're going to learn it just like their peers, but there's a lot of people who don't know how to teach the math skills. So yeah, I've seen it. I've seen students get out of it, but it has to do more with the lack of knowledge of the instructor than it does with the ability of the student. If you teach, kids will learn. I mean, that's just the way it is, but the instructor has to have the knowledge to do so.
OLEG:
How would you expect a sighted math teacher at college level to have that knowledge?
DENISE:
I really wouldn't. So a college math teacher just needs to be able to teach, and the blind student hopefully by then knows how to use the computer and hopefully they have a braille display, but we're developing ways where you can learn math just auditorily also because a lot of other world does not have the financial means in order to get braille displays. But it really is up to the student to come into a college to know how to use their computer well, so they can access the programs that they hopefully would've been taught.
So the blind student should be able to just sit in class like all his or her peers, and when the teacher starts giving math directions, the student hopefully had gotten hold of the accessibility office and made sure all the work was accessible to begin with. Now a lot of math is accessible right from the get-go now, which is wonderful, but it is up to the student to know, to make sure to check with the professor to make sure they have the work in hand and it's on their computer and they're ready to go like all the other students. That's the ideal and that's what should be happening. It needs to be on the student.
Now in the lower education, I wouldn't expect that, that is on the teacher. Schools need to be hiring qualified teachers to teach these blind students proper math skills. So that is on the teacher. And what's on the student is they need to learn, they need to learn and they need to practice. They need to be keeping up with the same skills as their peers.
OLEG:
What makes a good access technology trainer at this level, kindergarten through 12th grade?
DENISE:
The first is, they're using the technology themselves and they know technology really, really well. So if it's an algebraic problem, is I don't care what the math problem is. The trainer knows how to braille it out, type it out. You need to teach them both if they have a braille option. You need to be teaching them both because let's face it, math is a whole lot easier to learn from a braille display or a hard copy. But we also know once again, a lot of part of the world doesn't have that ability, so you need to use your auditory senses, but it's teaching that, but it's knowing the technology yourself and you're using it constantly.
OLEG:
Is it fair to say that the best AT trainers, especially for kids, are blind or visually impaired themselves? Or would you expect a sighted person to have that level of competency?
DENISE:
If you're a teacher of the blind, which I am, which my instructors are, and I have several sighted instructors, you need to know all the blind skills. If you are going to be teaching blind students, you need to have the blind skills to do so. Now if people know me, I lost my sight, that's how I got in the field, but I regained the majority of my vision. So now I'm a sighted person who thinks like a blind person, but I like the combination of both. I have always at least minimum two teachers with one student, because I do like a blind mentor with them. But the blind mentors know the technology just as well as the sighted teachers. I will tell you, and this is what I've just noticed, that a lot of sighted teachers will have challenges teaching it, but it has more to do that it's so easy to grab that mouse. And the more you grab that mouse, then you're not going to have all that knowledge you need in order to remember the keyboard commands.
OLEG:
In the ideal world situation, when do you start working with a blind kid?
DENISE:
Well, the preferred is as soon as they're born. But formal training, as in braille and O&M, all that, they're hopefully plunking away on an old computer and hearing sound on the keys and they have a cane in their hand and they're getting acquainted with that and all the other blind skills that they're going to be using – that is, the age of 3 is my ideal for starting formal training on keyboarding, on a computer, Braille display hopefully, if that's an option. Of course, formal O&M, and all those other skills. So by the time they reach kindergarten or first level in other countries, then they're right with their peers right from the get-go. The other kids are paper and pencil and the blind student sits down on their computer and starts typing out what they need and email the work off to the teacher.
OLEG:
But Denise, starting that early requires a huge degree of awareness. I mean, the parents should be not just aware of the opportunities but also realize how essential this training is to their kid. How do you even create that awareness?
DENISE:
That is really tough, and I only know of one country and that's Israel, that actually that's built in. If the parent has a blind child, they're immediately connected up. That's not true with the rest of the world. And a lot of parents, it takes years for them to come to grips. They're usually looking for a solution to hopefully overcome the blindness somehow. So there's a lot of emotion going along with that also.
It would be wonderful that countries had better connections that the eye doctors, because that's where it's going to go, the parents are going to go to the eye doctor, and the eye doctor's going to say, "Your child really is blind." I mean, that is my ideal. I've always thought of that, but that would take a lot of incredible networking to convince eye doctors. There needs to be a general plan where they need to contact the hospitals or make that connection. So as soon as the hospital knows a blind child was born, they're getting a hold of those eye doctors. And so everybody's working together. So before that family walks out of the hospital with no information about how to teach their child, they walk out with a packet of different eye specialists and educational specialists and where to go, and it really needs to start at the hospital level so they can start presenting hope immediately. It's just a different way of learning. You're going to just learn a different way. But you bring up a great point, that's going to take some significant happening, and I don't know how that would occur. That the hospitals would all get on board with that.
Ole:
Dr. Robinson, you present a mix of two qualities. I'm hearing it right now even in talking to you. On the one hand, I can feel you are a tough teacher, you can be tough if necessary. On the other hand, I'm hearing you talking with a comforting tone, with a tone that helps me to see, well, it's going to be okay. There are no insurmountable barriers here. How do you balance the two, especially with parents of young children? When do you comfort and when do you demand?
DENISE:
Well, I've discovered that if you treat a child like however they are, like a five-year-old, and I think the students actually, I really appreciate this. I treat them just like any other student. It's like, okay, your peers are learning algebra, this is what we're going to learn too. It's like, okay, let's head to your platform, let's do it, and you just teach it. And they learn it and they become more human, versus a lot of times because parents don't understand. So the empathy goes toward the parents because a lot of parents don't understand that this child is a child like everybody else, you just need to teach them differently. And so it's that comforting tone toward the parents. But I don't want to ever give the opinion to the child that their blindness is somehow going to hinder them from learning, because that's false. They just need it a specific way, they need auditory, they need tactile. They just are going to learn a different way but they are expected to learn exactly, I mean, all the same information as their peers. Unless they have an intellectual challenge, then you adjust to that intellectual challenge, but if they're blind, they need to be doing the same chores as their sighted peers.
OLEG:
You talked today about introducing a braille display early on. One pushback we're getting on that is a braille display is a complicated and complex piece of equipment. Think of the front panel of the braille display with all the functions, that can be even intimidating to the kids. Is that true? Have you seen kids intimidated by the braille display, or is that more intimidating to the parents?
DENISE:
It's intimidating to anyone who doesn't understand the technology. Because if you put a computer in front of anyone, they're immediately going to acknowledge that, oh yeah, that's a computer. Now it's going to intimidate some people also, if they've never had any instruction on the computer. I mean, I know. I help a lot of sighted people also, so not just blind people. Yeah, yeah, if you don't have instruction on anything, it's going to seem intimidating. And when we get on with a child, we don't say, "Oh, by the time you graduate, you're going to have 10,000 commands under your belt." Well, that's going to shock them. That's not the way you do it. In third grade, you teach them third grade skills and they learn them and lo and behold, they learned 100 commands and they didn't even know it, but they do know how to open Word or Outlook or their Gmail or... So you don't come in and tell them a huge gateway. It's like, yeah, they have buttons all over it, it's no big deal. And what I would suggest for three-year-olds is because you're looking at cost, but there are a lot of broken braille displays out there. And kids love to push buttons, so give them one that's not quite working yet or it's on its last leg. So if they press a button, it actually will make a beep or whatever and have a dot come up. But until you also teach a child how to respect anything, teach them how to make their bed first. Can they take the dishes off the table and set the table? You start with the basics, and once you see they have some respect for it, then you start them out with a small braille display and you just need to teach one key at a time. And they will learn it, just like anything.
OLEG:
Another pushback we hear of is, we have duplication. So you're teaching the kid and he or she is working with braille and he or she is working with speech, that's one way of information access too many. Speech should be enough. Why do we duplicate?
DENISE:
No, that is absolutely not duplication. And the analogy I always give is: because there's more sighted people in the world. I'm going to give you a math problem. Okay? I'll start off with nice, basic algebra. That will be enough to stump them. Okay, I can go up to a quadratic formula and you've lost them. So if they say, "Hey, you only need auditory," and auditory is a skill, and I get that a lot of parts of the world cannot afford braille displays, so that there's different strategies to incorporate in that. But if the option is you can have a braille display, that's like giving a sighted person a math book so they can actually see the math problem instead of doing it all auditory.
Doing it all auditory, that is a skill in itself and it can be learned and taught. It can be challenging but I do know people who do... Not very many, let me tell you that. Only a couple, because you have to learn the strategies and skills to do auditory math. If you don't want struggle, it's just like a sighted person. It's like, I'm going to take your math book away, you're going to do it all auditory. Or, you give them the math book so they can see the print and you give a braille display or a hard copy braille to a blind person so they are going to have more success with that. That is not duplicating anything. Yeah, that is giving what you need to really learn the skills. And I would say the majority of people, and even in those poor countries, if you gave them the option between, "Hey, do you want it tactile also as well as auditory?" I've got to believe 99.8 would say, "Yes." I'll give that 0.2% to their... You might have the, yeah, yeah.
OLEG:
Denise, what was your own experience learning math at school? Was that braille books, or was that print, or auditory? What was it like then?
DENISE:
Well, way back in the day, so let's move before my eyes hemorrhaged, because my eyes didn't hemorrhage until my last semester in college. I was dyslexic, so reading of anything was tremendously challenging. And this is strange to say, but losing my sight was so liberating because I was introduced to the auditory world. It changed my life. So all this, looking at print and struggling with reading print was no more, because I was able to listen to it. And I was very fortunate because I had teachers when I had lost my sight, who introduced me, the first refreshable braille display, it was the size of a suitcase. I think there were only eight cells to it, but that was so incredible to see what the future was, and we're talking over 40 years ago. So I grew up with the technology, which was very fortunate, but. So I look at it more as just relieving for my dyslexia, that's it's like cool, because my sight was pretty poor at that point.
OLEG:
But then you didn't get to read braille on paper. You cannot really draw the comparison between using braille on paper and using the braille display. You were introduced to braille displays immediately, is that correct?
DENISE:
But no, that was just a borrowed thing. Oh no, it was all on paper. I mean, this was so new. And fortunately, my teachers, Abraham Nemeth and Fred Gissoni, you may not know those names. Those are very prevalent names in the United States. So the people that I was with were able to borrow these from a company, but this is like 15, $20,000 suitcase. Yeah, no, that was just, hey, this is what's coming up in the future. Oh no, it was all hard braille. It was all big, enormous, 40 volumes of math.
OLEG:
As I'm thinking of it, sometimes it seems to me that a 40-cell braille display is a step backward, compared to paper and slate and stylus. Because if you're doing a math problem with paper slate and stylus, you've got 2-D-access. I mean, you can go up to the previous line, down to the next line, and you can explore, and you get more than just 40 cells. And I'm thinking, why in the world do we insist on the braille display if we can just give our blind students the slate and stylus?
DENISE:
To get a child or anyone to do a slate and stylus is pretty nonexistent. I grew up with a slate and stylus. That's a pretty easy thing to whip out of your pocket, but now we have the phone. So there have been replacements of technology items. If you know how to use a braille display, you can move pretty quickly on it and it's not an issue. Yeah, it's going to come out linear. We do have the option to do Split Braille now, so you can actually see two lines at a time. You can always be looking at the line above on your braille display on one side, and you can be looking at the line below that you're actually working on. So there's a lot of advantages on that. Now we have a student at Harvard who's applied mathematics and she does it out in the braille display, but any real problem that gives her any fits, she goes back to her brailler and she'll stick a piece of paper in the brailler and do it out to make sure she actually did it correctly, which is just smart.
I'm going to tell you though, you're looking at geometry. You still have to have that hard copy math book. And math and science, I mean, those always have to be hard copy math books, but if you have the hard copy in front of you to output that pretty quickly in Word, is very, very doable. And then we combine that with Desmos graphing calculator online. So if you know what the picture is supposed to look like and you needed to do the formula, they do the formula out in Desmos graphing calculator, because the teacher wants to see the graph and the kids can just hit print screen and alt tap back and paste the picture right in with all their math work. So it really is a combination.
And everybody's different. You need to use the skills that you want to use, but a slate and stylus is not going to be as fast as a computer. And you can't instantly hand it in, you've got to have someone transcribe it. We want to eliminate that. How can you make a blind person just as independent as a sighted person? And that's going to take technology.
OLEG:
So a case study, I understand it's pretty simple when you do the basic arithmetic’s, the plus, the minus, the times, divided by, and so on. But suppose you have what, a sixth grader, I don't know when they introduce that in the states, and you are teaching them how to do a quadratic equation, and they need to work for the problem. Describe how that workflow goes. How do you prepare the material? How do they read this using JAWS and the braille display? And how do they solve for X? Because they do need the way to just go back and review, and especially initially when they still cannot do that in their head.
DENISE:
The math is changing so fast. So-
OLEG:
You mean another way to do a quadratic equation?
DENISE:
Oh, yeah.
OLEG:
Okay, tell me.
DENISE:
Yeah, so I've been working with, and he has become a really great friend, Dr. Golnabi, and he has mathkicker.ai, so I highly suggest you go there when we're done with this.
OLEG:
Will that just do the equation for me and sign my name?
DENISE:
Whole? No! You have to do all the work. What I highly suggest first is because I just put a video out, because we had been frantically working on this code, so everything that's free, so anybody in the world could use this. People can do this, and you can do anything on Mathkicker.ai, but if you go to my YouTube channel, if you open YouTube and just do at Denise M. Robinson and then just do a space, Tech Vision, you'll pull up my channel because I just did a video of that. And it will show you the power of how you can quickly see every character, how you can quickly even move from the left to the right. It's just a control right arrow, and you've just immediately moved that number on the left to the right or the right to the left. So there's commands to quickly move the math back and forward. You can see this all on your braille display. It works in UEB and Nemeth, so Mathkicker.ai does all of that beautifully.
OLEG:
Now I should add as a disclaimer, that MathKicker is a third-party product, which is not associated with Vispero.
DENISE:
Now saying that, Vispero just put out their MathCAT for UEB math, so that's here.
OLEG:
Is it fair to say that a blind person equipped with the right tools today can produce the math that looks great when printed out for sighted consumption?
DENISE:
Oh yeah, absolutely. Like I said, our Harvard student, if you didn't know she was blind, she's handing in an exact same beautiful, perfect math as everybody else. So those are, all of our other students. And yeah, you're learning the backslash DIV and backslash DIMES and the LaTeX and the Unicode along with everything. And the paper that they hand in and we're talking at the youngest level. I mean, if we get the kid at three years old, doesn't happen very often, but at least we get a lot of first, second or third graders. Well, they happen to be handing it in with a computer. It looks beautiful, it looks flawless. It's just like anything that any sighted person would hand in, and it's just teaching them what they need to learn.
OLEG:
Would you see a math scholar as a viable career option for a talented blind child? Would you encourage him or her and their parents to pursue that if that's something they're interested in? I'm not just talking about technology, I'm talking about some stigma that there are certain areas where a blind person cannot be efficient. And even coming to a university and hearing a lecture where everything is on the board or presented electronically, and some might say a blind student is not going to be able to follow that. So, would you encourage or would you discourage pursuing the career in math and sciences?
DENISE:
I absolutely totally encourage anything that someone wants to work for. I don't care whether you're sighted or blind. I mean, that's a conversation you've got to have with a student. If they're willing to learn how to do the work and be proactive, like going to the professor and saying, "Hey, can you please give me the notes that you're going to be writing up on the board so I could follow along on the computer?" Which they can do. And if you've got a braille display, once again, you can suspend the voice and just follow along on the braille display while you're listening to the professor, and then you can add details into the notes because that is what happens. Everybody has their notes, the general plan that they follow, and then they always add more information. Well, the student can do that right there, right in class.
If you have the wherewithal to work hard enough, and that's true for anyone, is sighted and blind has nothing to do with that. You have the intelligence to do it. You go for it, because you have to think bigger than sight. You have to think about the brain capacity of someone. Now, I'm going to take this student as an example, and she's just had a lot of great people around her explain detail. She can visualize things like nobody's business. I mean, better than a sighted person. And so you get into a field that's quote, "very visual." If you've done all the hard work, all the math, all the science, and you understand it and you know it, the information that you can give back intellectually will far outweigh someone who's staring at something and doesn't quite get it. So you're talking about intellectual power.
OLEG:
Sometimes I feel a child awakened in me. When we're kids, we often say the words, "That's not fair. Mom, that's not fair. He's getting this, I'm not getting this. That's not fair." Now I'm thinking of all the efforts a blind person must give to achieving our goals. All the blind skills we need to master, all the energy we need to spend to make that field level. And on the one hand, yeah, technology is helpful and it's helping more and more. On the other hand, I'm just thinking, mom, that's not fair.
DENISE:
Life is not fair. A person in a wheelchair, a person with no legs, no arms, he's going to say the same thing. There are a lot of exceptions to the rule in living. So let's talk about the blind world now. If you want to dream and dream big and you want to be successful at whatever you're dreaming, that's going to take work. And even people who look physically perfect, well, they might have a mental something going on. Typically, there's a lot of people that do, but life is not fair. It really isn't. So it just depends on, are you going to work hard enough to fulfill your dream with whatever physical challenge or difference that you have? If you don't get over that life is not fair thing, you're never going to be successful.
OLEG:
What is your company website once again so that we can use that as an entry point to your resources?
DENISE:
The company is Tech Vision, but we built everything for you, so it's yourtechvision.com.
OLEG:
Dr. Robinson, thank you for being with us and thank you for sharing what's important to you and to us as well.
DENISE:
Thank you very much for having me on.
OLEG:
Recently, I was talking to a JAWS user who said, "Hey, Oleg, can you help me? I was in the early adopter program dialogue in JAWS, and I checked that MathCAT box and it told me to restart JAWS, and I did. And I restarted JAWS and I don't see any difference." And quite frankly, I understand that user. In my place I probably wouldn't see any difference either. But there's one person who does see the difference because she's on the team working on developing those things. And I'm speaking of none other than Olga Espinola. Olga, welcome to the show and great to be talking to you.
Olga Espinola:
Thank you, Oleg. This is a great honor for me because as an ancient math teacher, from the days when there was no technology and we had hardcover braille books, some of which I had to write for myself as a teacher to get the teacher's editions, all the way to where we are now, and this was back in 1979 to '81 timeframe when I was doing that. Teaching sighted kids at the secondary school level, I taught eighth graders Algebra two and pre-calc at the time, and it was pretty difficult. But we have come an incredible way from those days. And so for me, this is a personal passion to have JAWS to be able to work with math. And what I can tell you is that in terms of this dialogue that we're talking about, we need to step back a bit to how we were doing math prior to now. We started supporting math in JAWS several years ago, and we're calling that now legacy math, for lack of a better term. So if you start JAWS right out of the box, you will be in that mode, it's still the default mode. The legacy math enabled braille users, as well as speech users, to interact with math, say in Microsoft Word, on the web. Initially you couldn't even write it yourself, you had to rely on somebody else writing the math. And then you would be able to see it, as long as you had contracted braille on, whether you had a braille display or not though, you would be able to hear it at least.
Now for a very long time, all we supported as far as braille, was Nemeth. And so whenever you turned on contracted braille for English only, you would be able to see Nemeth. If you were in another country, you could hear math, but you would not be able to see braille math at all. You would just get a blank on a braille display. Okay, that's where we've been for several years.
Then we added something called the Math Editor, and our Math Editor allowed you to type Nemeth and then insert such code into Word, and there would be output in math. You would be able to see Nemeth, as long as you had contracted braille on, and I emphasize that because without contracted braille, you would get a message that said you would have to have contracted braille on if you want to see math. So again, our Math Editor allowed now a braille user to be able to interact with Word. So now as a student or as a teacher, I would be able to write something using Nemeth in our braille Math Editor, insert it into Word, and there you would have math. So that got introduced several years ago, after this initial legacy math thing got introduced.
Moving on to what is happening now and which is really, really exciting. The Nemeth that we produced, whether it was with our own Math Editor or with what was given to us as output by Word or by the web, if you were interacting with the web, was not always ideal. There were issues with it, sometimes the Nemeth would be incorrect or show you errors. So what happened is we got involved with MathCAT, which is something that is a completely different interface internally from what we were using. And Neil Soiffer from MIT is responsible for this. So it is a third-party application that we have adopted, and it basically was an overnight change because he has done incredible work to make Nemeth work much, much better for output, than some of the errors that we were getting before.
OLEG:
Before you go on Olga, I understand that Neil Soiffer has been very open for cooperation with Vispero. I mean, our development has talked to him multiple times and they're in constant contact. It's not that we're just taking his product and making the best out of it, but we're working with him, which helps to improve his product as well. Is that the correct picture?
OLGA:
Absolutely. So Neil is actively working with us, we with him, back and forth as we add things. So right now, EAP dialogue, when you enable it, the first thing that's going to happen is that it's going to be MathCAT, not our old legacy math, that will be in charge. And in charge of output mainly, I'll get into that in a bit. But basically, what it means is that anything that you see as output, whether it's in Word or whether it's on the web, is now going to be driven through MathCAT and not through our old legacy stuff at all.
OLEG:
Will somebody who is just interested in output, will they notice a difference?
OLGA:
They should notice a difference, for example, with some things that in the past gave you errors or just look strange. One basic example that is completely different now. If you have some kind of tabular information as math, for example on our Surf's Up webpage, there is an example of math for a table. If you're using legacy math, you're going to get something that says something like an embedded math table, and that's all you're going to see in braille, that's all it's going to say in voice. And that really doesn't tell you much until you activate our Math Viewer and then you start digging in and seeing, oh yeah, well there's a table here and I have to do this and I have to do that, and I have to press this key. If I wanted an equation and that key, if I want to take... It's very, very cumbersome with our old stuff.
With MathCAT however, even without activating the Math Viewer at all, if you are on that Surf's Up page, just as an example, and you go to that same thing that was saying embedded table, now you're actually going to see the contents of that table in braille and it will speak. So it will say something like, "A equals C, W, Y, X," and so on. You will actually see the columns and rows. It will not be shown in braille as a normal table would be shown. So for those who are familiar with how to read a table in braille where you see column and row headers and so on, not like that. But the point is you'll see the content right there without doing anything, you're going to see that content of the table. And this is a game changer all by itself. There's so many others I could mention here about how MathCAT has improved things, but this is one area where MathCAT really shines, is with the tabular information. If you have columnar information, say for elementary math, where you have someone adding numbers, adding digits, and they're trying to show that, that's another example of what I'm talking about here. So that's a game changer all by itself.
Right now, the implementation is for English only. Say if you're in Spain and you bring up a MathCAT thing, you may get speech yes, but it'll be kind of weird because it will be spoken in English with a very heavy Spanish accent. So that's a work in progress and the good things are coming with that as we move forward into JAWS 2025 and so on. With respect to localization of other languages for speech with MathCAT turned on, and eventually for braille.
So here's what we've done for Braille at this time, which is very exciting if you are familiar with UEB math.
OLEG:
And UEB Math is another math code. So you talked about Nemeth at the beginning.
OLGA:
Yes.
OLEG:
And UEB Math is a more recent attempt to encode math, which was agreed upon by representatives of all English-speaking countries. Is that correct?
OLGA:
Yes, BANA, the Braille Authority of North America, is partly responsible for that, but not completely, I believe.
OLEG:
UEB is standing for Unified English Braille.
OLGA:
Yes, and what is important for anyone to understand about this math code business, is that something like UEB math is a subset of UEB braille.
OLEG:
For the English language specifically?
OLGA:
For the English language, yes. So if you have and are using an English version of JAWS and you choose UEB braille, you can still have the Nemeth, which has been the default for a long time and still is. Or you could instead say, "Well, I really want to use the UEB math that is a subset of UEB Braille." And so there is a way that you can do that now with JAWS.
So again, the first part is that if you want to use UEB math instead of Nemeth, it behooves you to set up the MathCAT first. If you are still using only legacy, you will never even see UEB math instead of Nemeth as an option. So the idea here is enable MathCAT first through that EAP dialogue.
OLEG:
So give me the clear steps. I just installed JAWS. In the EAP dialog, I turned MathCAT on. How do I now switch to UEB math?
OLGA:
So now what you need to do is go to Settings Center, open the Default file, go to the braille node, then open general and open translation. And when you open translation, you are in a dialogue that gives you your default Braille profile, whatever it is you have set for presumably UEB braille, that is the standard, if you've chosen UEB braille or if you've chosen us braille, it really doesn't matter. But the assumption here is we're using English. So if you're using Spanish or something else as your default, what I'm describing here will not work at this time.
So here you are in the braille node, general translation. You're looking at your default braille profile. You need to tab over to profiles, and it's going to open another dialogue. This is the place where your Braille profile is available to have changes in it. It's at this point where you want to tab over to details, and this is the details for your current braille profile. Open that, and here is where you're going to find, again, more things that you can change. But one of them now is UEB Math or Nemeth. The actual keystroke, the access key is Alt M for math, and you're going to see Nemeth as your default, and all you have to do is arrow down one time and you're going to see UEB math. Choose UEB math, tab over to your okay button, that closes the details dialog. You now have to tab some more to get to the next okay button and apply, to apply these settings.
For the moment, we're strictly talking about UEB Math and Nemeth that applies only for English-speaking countries at this time. And I'm open to any questions that people may have about this. They can write the suggestions at vispero.com. There's also feedback that you can provide through the EAP dialog itself about MathCAT and what you think about it, what you think about this UEB math thing and Nemeth and the rest of it. Feel free to add comments there.
OLEG:
But Olga, what good does all of this do for somebody who does not have a braille display? Are those changes affecting these people, and are they helping in any way to configure your math verbosity or what gets communicated or how?
OLGA:
If you do not have a braille display, then you're simply going to be using Word's Equation Editor to create math content, or you're going to be just reading math on the web and it's only going to be a speech thing. What you have here now is in Settings Center, there is a speech node and a navigation node that are going to be important to you as a speech-only user. And again, you have to have MathCAT enabled in the first place in order even to see the math node in setting center. For speech users, we have certain defaults set up for that math node so that your verbosity when you're just reading and navigating, is a certain way that we found the most effective. You can change those and play around with them. And what will happen then is that as you are just reading the math, or as you are navigating through the math, you're going to get various different levels of speech verbosity.
If you have, for example, the most verbose speech turned on, when you look at say a fraction, it is going to say something like, "The fraction of two as the denominator," extremely verbose. And so we've chosen something that makes more sense as part of the MathCAT options that are available. But a user can, once again as usual with these things, you can turn them on, play around with them, say, "No, I really liked that the default's better." You may choose that you want it a certain way for just reading and another way for navigating.
OLEG:
Olga, let me go over that by using a very practical example. So you're a dad or a mom and your kid comes up to you and says, "I'm having trouble understanding those quadratic equations at school. Can you help me?" And your problem is you have forgotten all of them. So you go to a website, Wikipedia or whatever, and you find quadratic equations and you're reading this with JAWS. How do I deal with that fraction or that formula or whatever that expression may be?
OLGA:
So what you want to do here then, and in this case we might be talking about a Word document or we might be talking about a web document. You have to have MathCAT on if you really want to do this well. Just all the way around, this is what's coming not too long from now, it will be out of the EAP thing entirely and it will be the only thing available to you because it is so superior to what we had.
So here what happens is you want the Math Viewer to help you. The reason I mentioned Word document versus web is that the keystroke is slightly different to get to the Math Viewer in Word than it is on the web for technical reasons. So if I'm on the web and here's a math equation, you bring up the Math Viewer and if you're on a formula or any kind of math expression on a web page, and if you press enter, now you are in the JAWS Math Viewer.
OLEG:
So the first thing to remember is press enter, if that's on the web.
OLGA:
Yes. Now this does not take away the web page, it doesn't mean that it closes it or anything, but it just brings up the Math Viewer into focus. And as a sighted person, you're going to see things highlighted for you as you move around. And yes, you can start moving by character, you can move by "word," that is to say with control arrows. Right and left control arrows or just plain right arrows. And what you're going to find is with MathCAT, depending on the structure of what you're looking at, it's going to say something like, "Zoomed in all the way, cannot move right," and what that means is then you might have to play around a little bit and maybe up arrow and then right arrow again to see the next chunk of data to see the next section. So you may have to play around with it within the Math Viewer a bit to get what you want.
Now, one nice thing that we did too is a kind of a, where am I, thing. So wherever you are within the context of an expression in the Math Viewer, you can press any of the familiar JAWS keys, like current character, current word, even current line, and it will tell you as much as it can tell you at that point about exactly where you are, which is really helpful.
Now, one of the things that is different about MathCAT versus the old way that we used to have, is that if you are looking at an exponent, for example, let's say it's X squared. If you're looking at the X, it will say, "In base X," and if you're looking at the two associated with that, it will say, "Two superscript." And so at least you know, oh yes, that's raised. Okay, so you might be able to tell your blind child, "The reason it's saying superscript is because that's a raised thing. So that means it's an exponent and the base is the thing that it's raising." So those are some of the things that you can adjust in the math navigation thing that we talked about a few minutes ago in default setting center. The only difference between this approach to getting into the Math Viewer and the one in Word, because the Math Viewer part works exactly the same way. The only difference in Word is that you're now on a math expression and you're in Word. You need to press insert space, followed by the equal sign…
OLEG:
Because just pressing the enter would simply insert another line, and that wouldn't make sense.
OLGA:
It would insert another line, and it might even insert it in the middle of a math expression. So you definitely don't want that.
OLEG:
So Olga, all of this is nice and good, but there is a math language called LaTeX, that is getting used more and more. Is that supported in JAWS at all?
OLGA:
It is. What I can tell you is that it is available through our Math Editor. Even if you write two plus two equals four, say using Nemeth or UEB Math, either one, you can choose to not just press enter and have it inserted into Word. Instead, you could choose, I want to copy this as LaTeX instead. Basically, the underlying thing that is behind all of this, and this applies to MathCAT as well as our legacy stuff, but basically what you're doing is using MathML. And MathML is a subset of HTML. That's why MathML itself doesn't really know or care what the "language" is, as such. And some people have said, "Math is math is math. PI is PI is PI. Equals is equals is equals." Visually, that is true. But with respect to braille and with respect to how the screen readers handle speech, it's not quite so simple.
OLEG:
I wish we had all those tools in school and university, but I'm hoping that's only going to get better as years go by.
OLGA:
Yes, I need to add one more thing here, Oleg. For those who are using MathType, and there are many, many people out there using MathType as their preferred method of input and output. MathCAT supports that as well, and so does JAWS. So anybody who has a MathType license and is using that, especially teachers, will be happy to know that this also is a positive thing for them, that they can continue to use that to create documents in Word for their students that are blind. And those students will be able to use MathCAT with MathType.
OLEG:
So MathType is still relevant?
OLGA:
Oh, absolutely.
OLEG:
Thank you Olga, and thank you for all your efforts along with the team in developing that functionality.
OLGA:
You're welcome, and more to come. We'll probably need to do another podcast sometime in '25 when we add more things here related to all this. It's very exciting.
OLEG:
Well, thank you once again, Olga. And this brings us to the end of FSCast episode 248 for August 2024. Our back-to-school episode.
September is around the corner, and that is a time when we usually introduce some of the new features and functionality in our Freedom Scientific products. I don't know about you, but the team here is looking forward to that opportunity. We also look forward to your emails. Our email address is Fscast@vispero.com. So I hope to see you in a month, but I also hope to hear from you much sooner. For now however, this is Oleg Shevkun. On behalf of our entire team saying goodbye, and wishing you all the best.