Many thanks Emma, I am hoping that we have persuaded the potential student that they need to do at least an AS level in maths before coming on the physics course, this will give us a year to figure out what to do to support him, I am also hoping that he will aslo gain some strategies for dealing with maths or he may realise that Maths (physics) is not going to be accessible for him and change direction.  I will certainly feed back to you if he chooses to do it.

We did have a blind student doing computer science a couple of years ago - he had a maths module and that proved quite challenging.  He was a Braille user (but had never used maths Braille), we were very creative in how maths was shown to him and quite often we would have large tactile diagrams of the mathematical equation and the numbers written in Braille i.e. 4 = four and we would write the equation in long hand i.e. four divided by six over twenty equals....  Very long winded I know but he did pass the module but it was hard work....

Many thanks
Jane

-----Original Message-----
From: Discussion list for disabled students and their support staff. [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Emma Rowlett
Sent: 13 September 2007 15:32
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Blind student doing Physics

I'm about to start work with my husband and Michael Whapples on looking at maths and braille, but if the student concerned doesn't already read braille it isn't much help!  I have looked at other ways of accessing mathematics, but since there is no real 'standard' when it comes to reading maths aloudwitha erpsonal reader it is quite difficult and formulae can be ambiguous.  One way is to learn LaTeX as has already be suggested, but having tried this myself recently I'm not sure I'd recommend it unless the student shows an aptitude for it (I certainly don't!)  MathPlayer can turn LaTeX (and some other formats I believe) into spoken mathematics and I find it quite good really.  However, I'm lucky that I have enough residual vision to turn maths documents into large print if I really want to and don't know how I'd manage if I couldn't.

I'd be interested to hear how this all works out as I've been trying to find case studies of visually impaired students studying maths type subjects in particularly (for my PhD) and haven't had as much luck as I'd have hoped for.

Good luck,

Emma

On 13/09/2007, Clare Trott <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> "Obtaining Braille Mathematical Documents" by Michael Whapples, School 
> of Physics and Astronomy, Nottingham University, is published in the latest MSOR Connections vol 7 no 3.
>
> Available on-line at http://ltsn.mathstore.gla.ac.uk/articles/new.asp
>
> Clare
>


--
Emma Jane Rowlett (née Wright)
School of Sociology and Social Policy
University of Nottingham

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