[Athen] alternatives to handwritten math answers posted online

[Brusnighan, Dean A.]

Cath and Sean,

Thank you both so much for the information you shared. I learned a lot from the suggestions you offered. The Disability Resource Center and I will present some of these options to engineering faculty later this week.

Dean


From: athen-list-bounces at mailman1.u.washington.edu [mailto:athen-list-bounces at mailman1.u.washington.edu] On Behalf Of Sean Keegan
Sent: Thursday, October 03, 2013 8:16 PM
To: Access Technology Higher Education Network
Subject: Re: [Athen] alternatives to handwritten math answers posted online

Hi Dean,

The short answer is yes - for an online situation, MathML is your best alternative. That being said, I have not been having the best success with MathPlayer and IE right now, so there are no guarantees it would work for a student who requires screen reading support.

Depending on the people involved, Cath's suggestion is how we would likely proceed as well. Using the handwriting recognition tools with MathType in Windows, you could meet the professor "halfway" in that the equations could be handwritten with the caveat that it would require MS Word.

We have had this situation a few times and our alt format team ended up doing the conversions for such solution sets. Those scanned documents can be a real nightmare as the handwriting can be a mess to decipher so as to convert into MathType+MathML.

I do think there may be some options with the Central Access Reader from Central Washington Univ (http://www.cwu.edu/central-access/reader) in that the professor could provide the documents as MS Word+MathType and the student could then use the CAR application to read the content; no need to deal with MathML.

In general, though, my recommendation is to at least use MathType+MS Word (or Scientific Notebook) so as to streamline the conversion into a format that uses MathML. This could be for a web page, MS Word document, or DAISY+Math book.

Take care,
Sean


On Oct 3, 2013, at 12:14 PM, "Brusnighan, Dean A." <dabrus at purdue.edu<mailto:dabrus at purdue.edu>> wrote:


Hello All,

What alternatives can our Disability Resource Center (DRC) suggest to an engineering professor who likes to scan his handwritten homework answers and post them online? To my knowledge, there is not currently a student with a disability in the course. The DRC is being proactive.

Is a MathML document the only viable alternative?

Thanks in advance!

Dean

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Dean Brusnighan
Assistive Technology Specialist
Purdue University, Young Hall
155 S. Grant Street
West Lafayette, IN 47907-2108
Phone: 765-494-9082
dabrus at purdue.edu<mailto:dabrus at purdue.edu>
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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