Here's the transcript (in a raw form). The task is down when we've done enough to check, improve and shared the content.
so part of the motivation for this was some very promising news we had
last week from jaina schroder who is a candidate for the holman prize
i think there's three or four of them awarded every year and it's 25
000 to a blind person to do a project that they're motivated to do
that will help themselves and in and other blind people and she wants
to do something for making coding the coding experience and i think
particularly the learning coding experience better for blind people
and i think there's a very strong connection between accessible code
and accessible math because in both cases you've got um a tree
structure to understand and you have the problems of visual display of
structured information and mathematics and programming have always
been close partners and my view is that once people have got to a
point where they understand what computers are accessible programming
is actually easier than accessible mathematics and we can go into the
reasons for that later but i think the technical problems on some
extent the surgical problems and so forth easier to deal with so i
rather feel that a focus on accessible code accessible math along the
way it's a warm-up exercise or a dress rehearsal if you like so this
session today is in a certain sense focused on well if jaina gets the
holman prize or if she doesn't get it but still wants to work in the
area what can we give her what can we provide her that will help her
with what she wants to do and also help us with real what we want to
do and i'll take it as a given that we have a special interest and a
special responsibility for mathematical content and for pdf and also
for accessible outputs from latex that don't have to be pdf so that's
the sort of background for it and the basic idea is this discussion
the goal is that we support and we are supported by what there already
is and one of the great problems with what they're already is there's
so much out of it there [Music] and the i i see an important thing is
the growing and the growth and the health of a community of practice
there already is a community of practice but um we're not in contact
with all of it a couple of weeks last month we had um some people from
the pretext project and they have a very nice community of practice
and the tech community has its own community of practice and there's
not the interaction we want i think getting more interaction between
the various communities of practices is quite important the final
thing in this sort of general introduction is that it's a social
problem and a technical problem accessibility is a social problem and
a technical problem sometimes the technical problem is the key and
sometimes social problem and sometimes there may be other matters as
well so i find myself one of my ways of working is to try and find the
right questions search for the answer on the internet and one of the
things that happens from that is serendipity you discover things you
don't know before you don't you didn't know about so i discovered a
website called accessible accessibleweb.com it's in the email i sent
out and it seems to be a consulting business based upon somebody who's
wanting to help people with accessibility problems it seems to be a
sort of a h hold some business and that was simply because i searched
for something like accessibility tree or accessible tree navigation
and they had a good page for it so sometimes you can search for
something you know just to find other people who are also interested
in it um i'm going to go into a digression here one of my favorite
websites is the online encyclopedia of integer sequences which was
founded by neil sloane of absolutely i think the great foresight in
now how did you manage to set up an online encyclopedia before
the web well the answer is he published springer published a book for
him which is called an encyclopedia of integer sequences and i just
went online so it's the online so so the great thing about that is you
can do your research and you get a sequence of energy sequences and
then you can go to that place and you find that other people are
interested in that same sequence and you'll learn mathematical
connections that you probably weren't aware of so if we can get that
sort of clearing house that would be helpful because i don't think
we've got that now um we sort of have we have bits of it so what what
i'm wanting to do is i want this to be more like a workshop where we
look at top level questions figure out how we try to find information
about them we might take a time out to do some web searching if we
want to and the other thing is we can think about useful pages and
think well behind them how can we help other people find them so
there's a whole bunch of different ways of approaching this thing and
i i'm i'm welcome to all of them so i'm going to stop for a little bit
because um i've run out of energy i snuck a link into the chat because
i was having a conversation with some of the people that built the
accessibility plug-in with mathjax about making it self-voicing that
way you didn't have to have a screen reader software to actually take
advantage of the audio aspect of math jack's presentation and [Music]
the author of the plugin kind of took that idea and extended it to
just a generalized tree walker and then he was able to create you know
chemical molecule a um kind of a tree diagram uh even like um not
totally sure what a t i k z diagram is um but it seems a lot of times
in my alternate media past i had to describe a lot of computer science
diagrams especially like in courses where students were studying
compiler design um you know so they had binary trees um or they may
have been studying optimization you know and it was often we would
come up with these long convoluted flowchart like outlying pros
explanations of what these diagrams look like because they were just
too deep or too complex to render into a tactile diagram with any
efficiency i mean it would be like as big as a wall but i think you
know this generalized approach to thinking of an equation as a tree as
a diagram as a tree as a chemical molecules a tree you know and of
course you have in object oriented models you often have a tree like
diagram or uml diagrams just the ability to to come up with a
standardized interface for navigating and perceiving those orally with
that exploration i think would be kind of useful so i was excited
about where um he was going with that as something that could
eventually maybe be plugged into some tool it's like a super set of
what matt jacks is now i suggest we come back we can continue with
that now but we can also come back to it later in the context of other
things but something you said you used the phrase self-voicing and
that was a phrase a concept that i was actually searching sorry for
searching for searching for that phrase self-voicing and i'll take it
on trust from you that it's a standard part of the vocabulary so is
that there's actually another thing which is standard vocabulary and
glossary so we could probably use a sort of math accessibility
glossary or a coding accessibility glossary when i worked at the open
university in technical support not teaching or that many of the
courses had glossaries and they were really important things the
students will go there when they're stuck and there's also reading the
glossary as a way of getting an overview of the whole thing
The video for this clip is here (YouTube).
Here's the transcript (in a raw form). The task is down when we've done enough to check, improve and shared the content.
so part of the motivation for this was some very promising news we had last week from jaina schroder who is a candidate for the holman prize i think there's three or four of them awarded every year and it's 25 000 to a blind person to do a project that they're motivated to do that will help themselves and in and other blind people and she wants to do something for making coding the coding experience and i think particularly the learning coding experience better for blind people and i think there's a very strong connection between accessible code and accessible math because in both cases you've got um a tree structure to understand and you have the problems of visual display of structured information and mathematics and programming have always been close partners and my view is that once people have got to a point where they understand what computers are accessible programming is actually easier than accessible mathematics and we can go into the reasons for that later but i think the technical problems on some extent the surgical problems and so forth easier to deal with so i rather feel that a focus on accessible code accessible math along the way it's a warm-up exercise or a dress rehearsal if you like so this session today is in a certain sense focused on well if jaina gets the holman prize or if she doesn't get it but still wants to work in the area what can we give her what can we provide her that will help her with what she wants to do and also help us with real what we want to do and i'll take it as a given that we have a special interest and a special responsibility for mathematical content and for pdf and also for accessible outputs from latex that don't have to be pdf so that's the sort of background for it and the basic idea is this discussion the goal is that we support and we are supported by what there already is and one of the great problems with what they're already is there's so much out of it there [Music] and the i i see an important thing is the growing and the growth and the health of a community of practice there already is a community of practice but um we're not in contact with all of it a couple of weeks last month we had um some people from the pretext project and they have a very nice community of practice and the tech community has its own community of practice and there's not the interaction we want i think getting more interaction between the various communities of practices is quite important the final thing in this sort of general introduction is that it's a social problem and a technical problem accessibility is a social problem and a technical problem sometimes the technical problem is the key and sometimes social problem and sometimes there may be other matters as well so i find myself one of my ways of working is to try and find the right questions search for the answer on the internet and one of the things that happens from that is serendipity you discover things you don't know before you don't you didn't know about so i discovered a website called accessible accessibleweb.com it's in the email i sent out and it seems to be a consulting business based upon somebody who's wanting to help people with accessibility problems it seems to be a sort of a h hold some business and that was simply because i searched for something like accessibility tree or accessible tree navigation and they had a good page for it so sometimes you can search for something you know just to find other people who are also interested in it um i'm going to go into a digression here one of my favorite websites is the online encyclopedia of integer sequences which was founded by neil sloane of absolutely i think the great foresight in