Karen says:
I just got back from 3.5 days at a camp with 15 adolescents with significant disabilities. Most use AAC devices and some sort of alternate computer input. One teenage girl explained to me that she is pretty good in math but she has two problems as she tries to tackle high school math.
1. She needs on onscreen calculator that is scanning accessible and allows her to send the answer from the window on the calculator to the document she has open on her computer. For the most part, her documents are actually scanned omni-page or pdf files - she steps through answer fields using a tab key. Right now, the only option is to copy, minimize, activate the form, and paste - that is really hard for her.
2. She needs some sort of math program that allows her to show her work. There is a program called Math Pad that kind of lets you do this, but it stops at simple multiplications and division.
Also, I’ve had teachers of the visually impaired ask me for calculators that would enable kids to show their work.
6 comments
Being a maths lover, I’ve been thinking about this since I read it a few weeks ago and thought about it today when I found http://elemaths.com/products.html - they’re not open-source but they are shareware so you can try them, and they’re available for Mac and Windows at least. That might solve the second part of the problem in the short term at least.
The other thing that comes to mind is isn’t there a unix-based command line calculator somewhere? I haven’t used one for … probably a decade … so my memory may be totally off here, but I seem to remember something line-based which would show working by default, eg:
> 2+4
6
>*2
12
>+4
16
>sqrt
4
… and so on. It would require a bit of learning because the symbology isn’t the same as a math teacher would teach it with sqrt/etc. Even if this doesn’t exist and I’m halucinating, it’d be a fairly trivial C program and then programming a scanning layout including the numbers and +, -, /, *, sqrt, ^2, and so on should make it emminently usable. Also, if somebody wrote one for the purpose then automatically saving the session to mathlog_YYYYMMDDhh:mm.txt or something should be trivial. Also, it’d be easily portable to Unix and Windows and OS X.
Dammit, now I want to write the bloody thing. Somebody beat me until I come to my senses?
I’ll come back if I find anything else!
Ricky Buchanan
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ATMac - http://atmac.org/ - Assistive Technology for Mac OS X Users
Couldn’t get this out of my head and stumbled over another possibly useful option today - Longhand for Mac OS X built on “calc” for Unix. It’s like a word processor calculator so workings will always be shown. Free from http://longhand.palary.com/
Ricky
Thanks for the pointers Ricky.
Talking to Karen today, accessible math came up again. I pointed out Ricky’s comment about Longhand. As we discussed it, we realized that equation evaluation could be a generalization of the word prediction commonly included in switch accessible on screen keyboards. With word completion turned on, after typing AB the software might suggest ABOUT as a possible completion. We could simply generalize that to equations. So after typing 2+3*5= the system could provide 17 as the completion. A more sophisticated implementation could allow functions too. This would make a great project for a student.
Karen says the software she uses is http://www.wivik.com/description.html
I’m still thinking about equation evaluation as completion and it occurs to me that we could quickly hack this into Daniel’s Tar Heel Typer. It’s written in ActionScript which is essentially identical to JavaScript. I went looking for a parser generator for JavaScript and found JS/CC Parser Generator which apparently will do the job just fine.
Daniel already has simple word prediction. I imagine we can hook into that code looking for an equal sign preceded by a string that looks like an equation (perhaps a simple RE will do this job). Then we feed that string to the parser to see if it evaluates to a number. If it does, we offer that as a possible completion.
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