[Athen] Math and Braille Star 80

[Sean J Keegan]

 > We have recently purchased a Braille Star 80 for our assistive 
technology lab.
 > I am a sighted person and I don’t read braille. We have a blind 
student who
 > reads braille and is a physics major. Does anyone know if/how to get the
 > display to read math equations?

Hi Sheila,

How are you preparing the materials for the student?  Are you 
transcribing into Nemeth braille?

One of the challenges we encountered when creating Nemeth braille for 
students using refreshable braille displays was the formatting did not 
always get retained compared to creating hard-copy materials.  Our 
students were using BrailleNote devices and, depending on the content, 
we found that the equations or formulae could lose the requisite 
formatting when converted into a format compatible with the braille 
display.  This was particularly problematic when dealing with matrices.

For producing math content, we generally started with MS Word documents 
and used MathType to enter equations.  From there, we converted into 
Nemeth using Duxbury 11.1 and then reviewed the content to verify the 
conversion was accurate.  We also did a lot of tactile graphic creation 
for students, which is often overlooked as an important component in the 
sciences.

Take care,
Sean
-- 
Sean Keegan
Associate Director, Assistive Technology
Office of Accessible Education - Stanford University
http://studentaffairs.stanford.edu/oae