As a teaching tool, it will still rely on the teacher to teach the mathematical concepts to the student. The workstation should not give the student any advantage over a sighted student using a pencil and paper. This will be useful for more advanced students who have already learned the basic mathematics and do not want to be bothered by the low-level manipulations. There are many other visual representations of mathematical information such as diagrams, tables and graphs but within this project we chose to not be over-ambitious and to stick to textual representation. In a separate project at the University of York, we have developed Soundgraphs as a means of presenting simple line graphs to blind people.
Prosody improves a speech based interface.
Stevens, R. D., Brewster, S. A., Wright, P. C. and Edwards, A. D. N. Design and evaluation of an auditory glance at algebra for blind readers. The Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Auditory Display. See also publications on Mathtalk . Return to the Maths page.