Cyndi: Hello, my name is Cyndi Rowland and I'm the technology director for the National Center on Disability and Access to Education. I'd like to welcome you to our third in a series of webcasts that deal with issues of electronically mediated education for students with disabilities. Today we're going to focus on the electronic accessibility to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics classes otherwise referred to as STEM classes. Today we have an impressive panel that will talk about some of the issues. Allow me to just make some introductions. I know we've got all of you with us today. Dr. John Gardner is professor emeritus of physics at Oregon State University , and he's also the CEO of ViewPlus Technologies. John started as a company pretty much to commercialize the products that came out of the science access research products at Oregon State, didn't it?
John: Yes, it's your typical spin-off company from a university.
Cyndi: I know that project went on for a good long time you guys got a lot of very valuable information and deliverables as a result of that. What I've got to say about John is that he's considered a leading expert to STEM information, and we're just thrilled that you could be with us today, John.
John: It's a pleasure to be here.
Cyndi: We also have with us Paul Topping. And Mr. Topping is president and CEO of Design Science. Design Science makes a good deal of products used in accessible STEM courses, correct?
Paul: Yes. Because we make the equations that are in Microsoft Office, you know, our tools are used by probably 90 percent of the people that have to author math content.
Cyndi: Right. Well, I also know that Design Science is actively involved in the standardization of Math ML, since its inception and you've been a part of that. He also worked to add math support to accessibility standards, and examples of those folks listening would be the Daisy standard, the NIMAS and PDF access. Our last panelist is Jared Smith, who may be familiar to those of you that have tuned into our webcasts before. Mr. Smith works with the National Center on Disability and Access to Education and also with Webaim. Jared, I know that you teach the flash classes here at Utah State . What about the accessibility stuff?
Jared: Well, we'll be getting into that in more detail. First of all, it's just good to be with you. I'll be talking in more depth. Flash, I guess as an overview, is such a great thing for people with disabilities and such a terrible thing at the same time, so I'm sure I'll be talking about that in more detail as we go.
Cyndi: When we're talking about the accessibility of STEM classes, there's so much content that we could cover, and in fact I know that it was hard for us at the National Center to just decide on just a few topics, and we will be covering more specifically Math ML, flash accessibility, and we're going to be talking about some resources and products that you can use, and that will be helpful for those of you that are struggling with electronic access in those STEM classes. One of the things that I wanted to mention is that we're going to do our best to reserve the last 10, 15 minutes for questions that come in from our listeners. And you can go ahead at any point in the broadcast on the, towards the bottom of the webcast page is a submit a question, a box, so feel free at any point in time to do that, and we will address those, then, towards the end of the broadcast. Well, let's get started because I know we've really got a lot to cover. John, I'm interested in starting with you. We're aware that electronic, we're aware of a lot of electronic access issues for students with disabilities. I mean there are a lot of groups, Webaim is one of those groups, that has been dealing with that for years. But STEM classes are just enough different, and it makes accessibility a little bit harder. Why do you think it's more of a challenge? Why do you think science, technology, engineering, and math content is just a little harder to make accessible?
John: Well, Cyndi, I'm glad you asked me why I think, because if you ask anybody in this field, everybody has somewhat different opinions. I think that we can all agree that a large part of the problem of accessibility is that the electronic accessibility of information is largely limited to accessibility to words. And you can't express mathematics in words, at least that's not the way you would like to do it. The other problem is that not only are there mathematics equations, not 2 plus 2 and X plus Y equals Z, but in intermediate and more advanced mathematics, there are also a lot of diagrammatically explained things. So a student who is learning mathematics needs to be able to read the math, but he also needs to be able to write it, and to manipulate it. You have to be able to do your homework, to do your test, to be able to add 2 plus 2 and get 5. And- - Is that right? Well, anyway- -
Cyndi: (Laughing.)
John: The diagrams are more generally a problem, though in reading students need to be able to write some diagrams, as well. But I think those are things that everyone would agree are barriers. Now, we get down to something that's more of my perspective on it. One of the difficulties, and possibly the major difficulty is that the methods that blind students are taught, in fact often not taught at all, but the ones who are lucky are taught to read math and to write math in various Braille codes, depending on which country they come from. These are things that are simply completely non-transparent to the mainstream teacher. Now, when blind students were all educated in schools for the blind, in which the math teacher also could read Braille or do Braille, this was not as great a barrier as it is now, when most blind students are actually in mainstream. So the sighted teacher has great difficulty communicating with the blind students. One of the results of this is that, for the most part--this is not true for everyone--but for the most part blind students in this country and most other developed countries are being taught math, not by math teachers, but by vision teachers. And with a few exceptions vision teachers don't know how to teach math. They don't want to do it, they're doing it because they have to, because the sighted teacher can't do it. So what you have is, because of the notation, you have a barrier being erected between the students and the teacher, in both directions. The student can't read what the teacher writes, or even if the teacher is willing to use the computer and write it on the computer, which is the right way to do it, and the teacher can't read what the student's done for homework. So you have to have a human being and this notational barrier between the students and the teacher. And I consider that to be a very serious problem, and I've spent a large portion of the last decade and a half trying to develop technology, technologies that allow blind children, blind students, to be able to read and write mathematics using a computer in a way that will transform easily to something that teachers can read, and vice versa. That one can have access to mathematical information in the way that sighted people view it, but viewed differently.
Cyndi: Well certainly unless you, as you said, unless you happen to have a math teacher who also understands how to orient, who has vision impairments or is blind, or you have a vision teacher who really knows math content, you've got this chasm that is probably very, very hard to get, to bridge. You know, it occurs to me, as you're talking, we're spending a good deal of time talking about students that have low vision or blindness. Do you see any similar problems when we go to a different disability category, for example, students that don't have functional use of their arms, or a way to use a mouse, I should say, and folks that are needing, you know, keyboard input in to create some, to get through their course work? I mean I would think that there might be some crossover in that it would be very difficult for them to express equations. But what is your thinking on that as well?
John: Well, students with physical disabilities have problems that are, well I would say they are similar in respect to their inability to access equations, if they're sighted they can still read the equations, but they have difficulty manipulating them, being able to write them, because writing is something, writing equations is considerably more difficult. I would think that with a tool like the math-type program that Paul will be talking about later, these difficulties could be reduced, but it's still relatively clumsy to write your math on, using a computer, using standard programs. They're really not made for doing the manipulations that one needs to do. Students with some other disabilities, such as dyslexia, disgraphia, which means bad handwriting, or difficulty in holding a pencil, also have similar sort of problems. They perhaps have difficulty understanding the mathematics, and difficulty understanding the mathematics is not just a problem for students with disabilities. Math anxiety is something that's widespread, and many of the tools that we, as a group on this panel are trying to bring forth, I personally believe if they're well done will help not just students with disabilities, but will just help students period.
Cyndi: Well you know, thinking about the elements that will help students with disabilities the most, of course I'm always thinking about how is it that teachers could be improving their teaching, or the interactions that they have to help students with disabilities understand this content? Do you think that the greatest challenge that they have is just the awareness of what the central problem is? Do you think that educators would benefit more by just knowing the availability of tools? I guess the question I'm asking, John, is if you could recommend that educators do one thing to improve this situation, what would that be?John: Well, the advice I give changes from year to year, because the technologies continue to develop. If we had all of the technologies that I dream about, my advice to educators would be to learn how to use them. Hopefully they will be fairly user friendly, but nothing works if it's not used.
Cyndi: Right.
John: We don't have all the technologies we need for anything. And so you can't solve all the problems. We're still a long way from the full panacea, the full magic bullet. The technologies that reduce this divide, that reduce the chasm, that make it a place that at least in places you can get over, please use those. Please just don't throw up your hands and say, "I can't teach this kid." There are many cases where a teacher can teach, quote, "the kid," instead of relying on the vision teacher or the special ed teacher to do the teaching for them.
Cyndi: Right. Well, actually, I'm wondering if either Paul or Jared have any thoughts on this. Any comments you'd like to make? You and I are having a lovely conversation, John, but I'm thinking I should open it up to our other panelists.
Jared: This is Jared. I guess I would just add that so much of what we're dealing with is an awareness issue, and John, I think you alluded to that, that if these educators, I think if they understood assistive technologies and how students with disabilities are accessing electronic content, or how they're not accessing it because it is inaccessible, I think if they are just made aware of some of those issues, those basic concepts, and then learn the technologies to help support making that content more accessible, I think, you know, if we can do that we've come a long way.
Cyndi: Paul, any thoughts you have?
Paul: Well, one thing that we discovered at the ATIA show, is that assessment of mathematics is a big problem for people with various disabilities.
Cyndi: Yes, definitely. That's interesting, we're going to be dealing with assessment later this season. Let's visit, though, Paul, while you're talking about math, let's talk specifically about Math ML, and I know that you are quite an expert on that. You know, many of us have heard about it. A lot of us, though, don't really understand why it was created in the first place. Can you give us a little bit of some context settings, here? What were the problems that led to the creation of a markup language that was specific to math? And any thoughts on why math content is just not working in a lot of assistive technologies today.
Paul: Well, it got started mostly as an effort to address the problems of putting math into web pages. HTML, you know, doesn't do it, a very good job by itself of being able to express mathematics.
Cyndi: And that would be really for the same reasons that John had been talking about earlier, I would guess, it is almost impossible to have almost a word-based representation of mathematic concepts.
Paul: I don't really think it's quite the same. It's really just a matter of the people inventing HTML just had other fish to fry. You know, I think they always thought that, "Hey, this is just the start, we'll deal with text and maybe we'll deal with math later." But you know, browser, the math that HTML took in the world, we got pretty much co-opted by various browser wars that everyone hears about between Microsoft and Netscape. Which we won't get into. But you know, that's how it really got started. And the idea here is that, you know, XML as a mechanism is sort of taking over the world. It's sort of behind the scenes of a lot of stuff. It doesn't provide anything for anybody directly, but it's just an underlying technology. Math ML, as all the MLs that we keep hearing about, is an XML-based language for describing math. Now, even though it started out with displaying math in web browsers as its, you know, maybe main reason for existence, it was recognized by everyone involved that, you know, there was no way that we were going to limit it to just that. I mean it can be used to exchange mathematical information between, say, two engineering programs, for example. And specifically we were recognized that rendering it as speech was an important thing. In fact, one of the participants early on is a gentleman by the name of T. B. Ramen, who was heavily involved in his own projects in making math accessible. So we definitely had as an eventual goal rendering into sound. And we've been working on that directly at Design Science via an NSF grant, we started working on last year, and John Gardner actually is involved in that.
Cyndi: Well, can you tell us how, you know, there are lots of- - At Webaim we get a lot of questions, frankly, about Math ML. It seems that there are some real challenges out there, in part because it's just not being supported. Any comments that you would- -
Paul: Yeah, I think the biggest problem is that, you know, there's so many bits and pieces of software that have to talk to each other these days, and so many commercial, you know, concerns. Everybody's struggling to, you know, get their technology adopted. In some ways math kind of falls to the way side sometimes. I think it's partly due to the math phobia. I remember when Design Science started, somebody said, when I described, you know, what we did, they said, "Well, you know, what's the worldwide market for that? Like ten people?" You know, and people drive cars, and fly in airplanes, don't realize how much of a role that mathematics plays in all of that.
Cyndi: Right. Well, as you look kind of towards the future, recognizing that all of these, all of this equipment really does need to be talking to each other, are you optimistic? Do you think things are going to get better, or do you think that as we go into the future there will just be a different kind of challenge to implementation and to use of Math ML?
Paul: No, I'm very optimistic. There are lots of things that are happening that convince me that this will occur, eventually. I think it's probably going to take longer than some people want, and certainly longer than will happen. The things that convince me are like, we were able to interface our math player software, which converts Math ML into speech, we were able to interface that with various screen readers. And that works today. I mean it's got a ways to go. I don't mean to say that it's, you know, any kind of complete solution yet, but I think it's a good sign. Another good sign is that publishers of textbooks and various other things are adopting XML in their work flows, you know, their internal publishing production work flows, and Math ML will get adopted, or is being adopted along with that. And so I think that, you know, it will be an effort like Daisy and NIMAS, PDF access, this will eventually make it easy to produce Math ML in accessible content.
Cyndi: Well, you know, you bring up NIMAS, and I had a specific question I wanted to ask you on that. And for folks that aren't, I apologize if we've been tossing around a number of acronyms. NIMAS stands for the National Instructional Materials Accessibility Standard. It's part of the latest IDEA, and it's based off of the national files format, although I guess we don't really know that yet because it hasn't been published in the federal register. When you look at a standard like NIMAS, do you feel that that is going to take care of some of this issue, or is it not going far enough? Because it's really just dealing with stuff that originates in print? I mean how are you categorizing NIMAS as being part of an overall, you know, help to the, in accessibility of math content?
Paul: I think it's a very important part. But I don't think it has to complete the process of, you know, sort of getting math- - You know, the path I guess, just to give a summary, is we're working on getting math involved in Daisy, which is a standard for, you know, E-books in XML, essentially accessible electronic books, and that is part of the NIMAS standard, which is, as you mentioned, you know, authorized by the IDEA. But what we're doing is adding math to the next version of NIMAS, which then has to get adopted, you know, by the next authorization, presumably of the IDEA. That will take, you know, years to have happen. But I don't see the world waiting for that. I think that it just sort of, the fact that that process is going on leads people to think that that's the right way to go, and that the laws will eventually be there.
Cyndi: That they'll catch up eventually, huh.
Paul: But states are already making their own rules as to what publishers need to produce, and publishers are also looking for ways to compete with each other, and you know, if they can produce, they can claim that their materials are more accessible, I think they'll use that to their advantage. So I don't- - Even though I think the NIMAS and IDEA efforts are certainly worthwhile, I also see the world not waiting for that.
Cyndi: Right. And I think you're right, I think it'll be other initiatives, even state laws that are being codified all over the nation to address issues of inaccessibility to educational content. So that makes a lot of sense to me. Let me see if either Jared or John would like to hop in on this topic, and we'll be shifting pretty soon off of Math ML, and moving on. I could talk to any of you guys for probably an hour each, I have to say that. But let me open it up to our other panelists here.
John: This is John. Paul, as you know, I'm an admirer of the work that you're doing in making your math accessible. Do you see any difficult accessibility issues? Or is this just a matter of hard work and time and progress?
Paul: Well, one difficult issue is still, you know, right now we're at the point of really sort of speaking equations from start to finish, and as you know, John, you know, navigation within an equation, so that a blind person can discover the structure of the equation, you know, see the numerator is above the denominator. And equations can get pretty complicated, and you really can't read them start to finish and understand them. So I see that as being a big challenge. I really think it's surmountable, but I definitely think it's a challenge.
Cyndi: Well, I've got to just tell both of you, John and Paul, we're getting a number of questions coming in for you. I'm going to shift, now, though, and have Jared talk a little bit about flash accessibility, and then we will be coming back to all of these questions. You know, Jared, there's lots of STEM courses that are using simulations to help students learn content, and I expect a great deal of these are created in flash to begin with. Wouldn't you agree that's the number one present or authoring tool for this kind of presentation?
Jared: Yes, especially in these areas. You know, recent numbers and discussions that we've had are beginning to indicate that flash may not only be just a major mechanism for delivering, I guess high-quality content in these areas, but it might be the most prevalent technology, probably even more than standard web pages. So we really are seeing more and more that flash is being used a lot in these areas.
Cyndi: So how is it that the use of flash is creating problems for students with disabilities?
Jared: Well, I guess I would start by saying that flash can actually be a very powerful tool to increase accessibility. Because of its nature and, its multi-media nature, you can present content in multiple ways, in text, in audio, and through visual, just through visual information. It's scaleable, so because it is vector-based, it can enlarge and be easily used by people with low vision. It can be made keyboard accessible. The advantages over the web, a static web content, you know, are pretty much innumerable, the fact that you can have these very active, interactive, animating simulations or games or other instructional materials is very, very powerful. With that great gift, I guess, that we have with flash, obviously there are many accessibility problems and limitations, and I guess I would just outline these probably by disability type. For those with hearing disabilities, you would, any audio content within that flash simulation, or whatever it may be, is not going to be useable. The solution there is to provide captions. Unfortunately there is no standardized mechanism for adding captions to macromedia flash content.
Cyndi: So that has to be done by hand right now.
Jared: It is. It's something that has to be done manually. There are some tools out there that can help in the process, but there are no real standards for web captions, or for captions inside of flash. For users that may have motor disabilities, you can ensure that flash is keyboard accessible, make sure that it does not require any fine motor skills. Again, sometimes that can be difficult based on the complexity of the flash simulation. Users with cognitive disabilities, there are a lot of issues there. But typically the same general principles that are applied to web content can be applied to flash content as well, and using clear and simple language, being consistent, providing easy and consistent navigation mechanisms, giving the user control over timing of the display of content. Users with low vision, again, flash can scale so it is easily enlargeable, and even probably better so than traditional web content. Because it is vector-based as it enlarges you don't lose any quality in the visual information. And then we come to probably the biggest issues are with those who are blind, and ensuring screen reader content, or screen reader access to that content. Keyboard accessibility and so forth. There are a lot of techniques that can help in this area, and I would basically outline the three objectives you might have if you're developing flash content and want to address accessibility, as we hope you would, for those with blindness. And the first real strategy might be to make the flash content itself natively accessible. This is going to require some technical skills ability to get into that flash operating database and provide additional information that may be needed, such as alternative text or images, ensuring that it's keyboard accessible, and so forth. Another alternative may be to make the flash content self-voicing by itself. So really what that does is it removes the need for a screen reader. So the screen reader user would just disable, turn off their screen reader, and your flash content accesses the screen reader. So it will provide audibly any of the important content and would also be provided visually to those that can see it. And then, by its very nature, there is a lot of flash content that may not be able to be made accessible. And Paul and John, the issue is absolutely very similar in flash as to what it is in math. Flash is not a linear technology. There isn't a logical reading order like there is in print or in HTML, similar to math. You know if you read it linearly it may not make sense as to what the math formula is. Flash has that issue as well. In cases where it cannot be made accessible, though we've found in most cases it can be made accessible if it's designed that way, we always prescribe that an alternative format, and the alternative accessible format is provided.
Cyndi: Let me ask, you know, as I listen, it sounds like just about everything can be made accessible in flash, but I know I have heard other developers that say, you know, there are just some limits, we can't delude ourselves into thinking that every simulation can be accessible. Can you speak to that a little bit.
Jared: Well I can definitely see the logic in that. And the truth of it is that there are a lot of simulations, or activities, or games that cannot be made accessible in the way that they are currently designed. So it takes, sometimes it takes some understanding, the developer has to take a step back and design differently, rather than trying to build it the way they want to and then try to add the accessibility to it on the back end, which is always a lot more time consuming, a lot more expensive.
Cyndi: So it's really the issue of understanding what you want at the point of development, so this may be an issue of folks that are looking at flash simulations that they have right now, they're thinking of, "For heaven sakes, how do we retrofit it?" And they're stuck.
Jared: And they may be in some cases. Although if you really understand what the main issues are with flash accessibility, and understand the fixes that can be applied to it, most things can be made accessible without major, I guess major redesigns or changes in the functionality. In some cases they cannot. So in that case we usually say, you know, let's see what we can do to either redesign or let's provide an accessible alternative that is going to provide the same content.
Cyndi: Now, Jared, are there tools, are there resources that folks typically use for flash accessibilities? And is macromedia helping to eliminate some of these problems in subsequent tools?
Jared: The answers would be yes. Macromedia has come a long way in providing mechanisms in the flash authoring application to address many of these issues. Again, by its non-linear nature and very time-based nature, the developer has to understand what those issues are and be able to design to those specific standards and mechanisms that macromedia has provided to them. And there are other tools that are out there that are information resources. The Webaim site, we have a tutorial that will walk through many of the issues as well as the accessibility fixes, macromedia has a lot of information. There are add-on tools, other applications you can use that can help in this. A couple that help in captioning of audio content within flash, there's High-caption, there's Magpie developed by the National Center for Accessible Multimedia, and so there are a lot of tools out there that can help.
Cyndi: Well, let me do the same as I've done with your other panelists. Paul or John, any questions or comments that you'd like to make about accessible flash, or
what Jared has shared?
Paul: Yes, I have one, this is Paul. I see this as being somewhat analogous to what's going on with PDF. Currently there is an effort that's just getting started called PDF access that is starting to try to define what accessible PDF would be and develop a standard. Is there any equivalent effort in the flash world?
Jared: Oh, you know, I know that there are a lot of people looking at these issues. PDF, you know, this is my interpretation is a little bit more open standard. It's more language based, so it's easier for others to analyze it and figure out what they can do to make it better or change it, whereas flash, being quite proprietary, is a little more difficult for those on, I guess, on the outside of macromedia to really get in and do a lot of work. We're working hard with macromedia to, you know, make them aware of what some of the issues are, and they're doing a lot themselves internally, and we applaud them for their efforts. But there still are issues, there are things that can be done better. So I guess the short answer would be, I'm not really familiar with any organized effort that's really addressing it.
Cyndi: Well, we have, like I said, a number of questions that have been coming in. I would like to remind all of the listeners that we have a number of resources that are linked at the bottom of our webcast page. I know that Jared has already shared some of the resources that he had added to that list, but I'd like to just briefly give both you, well, John and Paul, an opportunity to just briefly discuss the resources that you've linked from there, and then let's go right into the questions, because these are some really good questions that have come in. But John, why don't we start with you? You want to share with us the resources that you've got linked for our listeners?
John: Well, there's a link to ViewPlus, and the resources there. ViewPlus is a manufacturer of the Tiger Technology embossers that allow one to emboss much more and varied information than a standard Braille embosser, including, if possible, in Microsoft word, to put in a different format for a math type, and print math equations in standard visual layout, as sighted people see it, except that the
symbols are in Braille, and this is actually being used by a small number of students for various reasons. This is one of the ViewPlus products. There's some new products that are to be released within the next few months, including an ink attachment for our pro embosser that will overprint in ink, and we hope will greatly reduce the difficulty of communicating, at least things that blind children and students are having to read, because it will have ink on it as well as Braille, and therefore the sighted teachers will be able to read it. And finally there's our new IVEO technology, which is something we've worked for years on.
Cyndi: And that is, that IVEO, correct?
John: It's not an acronym, it's a name. Which IVEO is a technology, it's a technology of being able to present graphic information. Presently just static graphics, but we do expect to expand it to the dynamic things in future releases. It's based on scaleable vector graphics, which is the standard web graphic technology. And with our authoring system you can make scaleable vector graphics that are universally useable, that blind people can use, that people with dyslexia can use. As you can tell from my previous comments, my focus has been on making things accessible to people with print impairments, as opposed to physical or hearing impairments. These are regarded by most people as the most difficult choices, the most difficult accessibility problems, and we've tried to develop tools that make more information more accessible to people with print disabilities, at the same time hopefully make them at least useable by people with others. The innovation is for print disabilities, but we try to make them useable by people with physical and print disability.
Cyndi: Great. Paul, do you want to share some of the resources that you linked?
Paul: Sure. Basically I have a link to our home page, and because all our products, I think, revolve around Math ML, I mean they're not accessible in themselves, but they're used in authoring and production and support Math ML, which we think is the key to, eventual key to accessibility. Math player is currently the product that is closest to, you know, really being part of an accessibility solution. It still needs more work, but it's our plug-in for Internet Explorer that enables it to display Math ML and speak it. Currently what the speech, you know, works for simple math, speaking of large equations, start to finish, is not really good enough yet, and as I alluded to earlier. I also added a link to sort of our accessibility home page, and there we've got a few sort of white papers, having to do with our work on grants and things like that, as well as hooks into the math player stuff, some of the behind-the-scenes commentary.
Cyndi: Great. And I would just like to also share that we've added some other links to other resources and other projects that are working on accessibility within, to STEM content. I'd love to invite any of our listeners that know of a good resource that we don't have on that page to go ahead and just go into the submit a question, and then just suggest a URL, and we will be very happy to add those as well, as kind of a growing list of resources. You know, I'm very familiar with the work that University of Washington 's program has done with STEM, there is a project, well, east, there are a number of projects that are kind of springing up all over the country to deal with this. So I really would love anyone that knows of other resources that we should link to just suggest that. You know, I'm going to go now to some questions, and I think we've got just about 15 minutes left to be able to ask some. The first one, it comes in from John, and boy, I hope I'm getting this right, Carras, Cal State University, and the question is, "In moving toward web accessibility for all courses in this, in the CSU," and that's Cal State University, "we often hear faculty indicate that they do not have the time and resources to rework or build online materials to meet accessibility standards. So what are the counters to this argument?" Let me open that up to anyone on the panel.
John: There's no solution for the time but I think that it's up to people like us to try to provide more user-friendly technologies to make it easier to develop the newer courses so they are accessible, and hopefully at least do some retrofitting on other courses. But if we can make it easier, I find that people are willing to make things
accessible if they can, if they know how to do it.
Cyndi: You know, and I will add in, too, it's hard to know, I might be misreading this question, but the asker talks about reworking resources. And I wonder if those are resources that come ready made that need to be reworked, or if it's, if the issue isn't that we need to help faculty members understand principles of more universally-designed content to begin with. And to the extent that they are creating materials from the beginning that can be accessed by all of their students, regardless of ability, that that might take care of some of it. Although again, it's hard to know if the person asking was referring to, you know, commercial materials that come in. Any other thoughts on that one? And I agree, John, we can't ever solve the "there's too much work to do" problem.
John: Well, I have one comment on it, and maybe it seems obvious, but we're, most of the stuff that we're involved with Math ML and all of that is really around making mainstream content available, or in other words, you know, so that disabled people could be taught easily in regular classes with the same content that, you know, sighted people can use.
Cyndi: Right.
Paul: I fully agree with that philosophy.
Jared: And I would just add to that that, you know, to echo your comments, so much of it is an awareness issue. Most universities that we have been to, and most developers that we have trained, once they become aware of the issues they realize that it's really not that big of a deal and they have the motivation and desire to make their content more accessible. The idea of, you know, build it accessible versus retrofit it to accessible, it's always going to be easier, always less expensive to build it with accessibility in mind in the first place than to try to go back and fix it. And a lot of that has to do with what was mentioned in providing tools that really facilitate the development of accessible content. Our tools really need to be better. And the third point I would add to that is that we need better standards, and we need to work on standard harmonization So all these standards and guidelines that are out there regarding the accessibility of this content, they're all talking the same language, they're all working together, rather than sometimes against each other, which is sometimes what we see.
Cyndi: Well, and the other thing that I'd add into what you're saying there ,Jared, in terms of standards, I think that educational entities have an obligation to really think about procurement. You know, I wonder how many STEM instructors purchase off-the-shelf curricula that they're saddled with, and someone, whether it's them or someone within their disability resource center, or a special educator somewhere is now having to retrofit and tackle. If those entities had provisions from the get-go that placed some obligation on the vendor to provide accessible content to begin with, there just wouldn't be as much of this problem. Let me go to another question. Now, this one comes from Pam Williams at West Hills College , and Pam writes, "What if the student does not read Braille? How would you teach math or science concepts?" And John, this sounds like a question that's tailor-made for you.
John: Well, yes it is. I'm blind but I'm not a good Braille reader, because I lost my sight later in life. And we have developed tools, one of them is the Triangle program, which is pointed to, in the resources this is not a ViewPlus program, this is from Oregon State, that is, addresses this issue. If the student can hear, he can use the Triangle program, and it has been used successfully by at least a few students to do very, very high-level math and physics. We just, it's not such a problem if you take a view to making accessible technology that works in speech as well as in Braille and try to do that.
Cyndi: And of course I wish that our listeners could see what your products, the outcome of your products, because they really do, they're very, very helpful when they come out. The stuff that I've seen of yours is the stuff that's coming off the Tiger embosser, and I could- - I would be able to learn math and science concepts myself with that, and I certainly don't read Braille. Paul or Jared, any other thoughts on that?
Jared: I would add that it's a really good question, and it's the type of question that we need to be asking. So often we get, I think, locked into specific guidelines or standards or concepts, and we don't, we don't really start to think about things from the disability perspective, and I think a lot of times we need to take that back and think a little bit broader and ask those questions.
Cyndi: And maybe even from the standpoint of pedagogy. How do we teach it?
Jared: I think when we do that we have a lot of those "aha" moments, "Oh, that makes sense," or "I hadn't thought of that before," and then we can work on making it better.
Cyndi: Well, we've got a question in from Sean Keegan, a fairly technical question, but I think this is a good one for this panel. And Sean comes from the High-tech Center Training Unit, part of the California Community Colleges. And this is a question, Paul, directed at you. Here's the question. "The math player is generally blocked by IE, Internet Explorer, it's prevented from running with the default settings, i.e. security settings. In order to enable the active content to run, the user must use the mouse. So what steps is Design Science working on to allow the math player to work with IE without having to lower security settings?" That's one, and here's the second one. "Is math player version being designed for other browsers?"
Paul: Well, that is a good question.
Cyndi: Actually two.
Paul: Yes. Yeah, the security problem, I mean you know, as everyone that uses a computer nowadays knows, security is a big issue. It's also one that, you know, I don't see any kind of great solution coming down the road. Now, I'm a little surprised that you can't, you know, enable, I forget what the option in Internet Explorer is--this is a recent thing that they added, I'm not sure- - I'd be surprised you couldn't activate that without a mouse. But that would definitely be something you should take up with Microsoft. Another issue that you should take up with Microsoft, one of the things that people don't understand is they think that software companies have an "in" with Microsoft, and you know, we can talk to Bill Gates or somebody directly. Actually- -
Cyndi: You have him on speed dial, don't you?
Paul: Actually they listen to customers way more than they would listen to other software companies. Because other software companies are always trying to make
money off of Microsoft's decisions, where the customer is somebody they're trying to make money off of. I would encourage anybody to complain to Microsoft about that. We would like to see some way, you know, for us to install math player such that it, you know, gets under the radar, there. So it isn't considered a security threat. You know, that's up to Microsoft. We don't have much control over that. And what was the second part that I've forgotten?
Cyndi: Well, how about- -
Paul: Oh, in other browsers. We have, you know, offered to do it in other browsers. Unfortunately the technology doesn't exist in most of the browsers to, for us to hook math player in. Microsoft did a wonderful job in Internet Explorer. I mean, you know, they certainly have their flaws, but one of the things they did was actually enable us to create math player in the first place by having the proper programming interfaces for, to do what it needs to do. I should have mentioned, also, that Netscape and Mozilla and Firefox, which are all pretty much versions of the same thing, that browser has built-in Math ML support. Unfortunately, you know, it stops at displaying Math ML, and it doesn't provide accessibility. We would like to offer our math player product in that scenario, but again, you know, they haven't really provided the interfaces that would allow us to do that.
John: This is John. I'd like to say, I don't use a mouse and I don't have any trouble at all using the math player. It just works perfectly with my screen reader.
Paul: I think the question was just talking about the actual enabling of the switch that gets you past the security problem.
Cyndi: I think we've got time for one more question. This one is also very technical, but it's an interesting question. And it comes from Lois Franco at ETS, Educational Testing Services, and re, Paul, your comment about TV ramen and audio rendition. So here is the question. Some people in an educational or testing setting work with live readers rather than recorded or computer-generated audio for a variety of reasons. While Math ML style output can be scripted, the sort of audio that ramen described, for example, a higher voice for superscript, it's hard to script so as to ensure a reader will perform it properly. Any ideas?
Paul: Well I guess so what we're referring to, here, is a recorded voice, a human, recorded human voice as opposed to a synthesized voice if I understand it correctly.
Cyndi: Right.
Paul: I really feel that synthesized voices, the technology has gotten to the point where- - In fact there are new voices coming out currently that I haven't heard them myself, but other people have said that they couldn't actually tell that they were synthesized. Now, currently we don't have- - One of the technical issues we're dealing with currently is we don't have the control that we need to have in math player to tell the voice synthesizer all the things we'd like it to do, like we would like to be able to have pauses, and intonation changes and all that kind of thing. We currently don't have a good way of doing all those things in all situations. But we're definitely working with Microsoft and screen reader manufacturers, and anybody else who will listen, to try and remove those barriers.
Cyndi: That's great. Yeah. And I think there are a lot, the devil is in the details, as they say. You know, there's a lot of loose ends here that can confound or really help solve the problem. We are just about at the end of our broadcast time, and I just want to confirm to Pamela that we got your resource and we're going to be adding that. I want to thank Jared and Paul and John for their time. I also want to just remind everyone that this audio webcast will be archived very shortly, probably within the next day or so, off of the national center web site. And I'd also like to invite folks to join us for our next webcast, which will be held on April 20th. The topic will be on accessible electronic testing, low to high stakes. So that should be very interesting. If you'd like to receive notification of that event, please sign up as an affiliate of the national center, and you can do so right off of our home page, which is WWW.NCDAE.ORG. And we look forward to more webcasts to come. But John and Jared and Paul, thank you so much. This has been some great information. I believe this will be the beginning of a number of conversations to come for a lot of our listeners. So thank you all so much.