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Re: Steve: producing Understanding Physics

Posted: Tue Mar 27, 2018 8:38 am
by Sabina
I am chuckling at the comment about disillusionment and its absence.

Go, Math Team!

Re: Steve: producing Understanding Physics

Posted: Tue Mar 27, 2018 9:44 am
by steve.murgaski
Yes, the saga of the math team continues. William Freeman, at Quality Assurance for American Printing House for the Blind, responded to my email to the BrailleBlaster support email list. William says there was a mistake on the APH website, and BrailleBlaster doesn't yet support epub, although it's coming. BB does support MathML, but at the moment it seems only to open NIMAS files. There doesn't seem to be an easy way of converting other file formats to NIMAS (but someone please correct me if I'm wrong about that).

I also spoke on the phone this morning with Kieth Creasy, at APH. He thinks epub support should be implimented in a couple of months, but he apologizes that at the moment BrailleBlaster probably can't work for this project. He mentioned that "Producing a textbook is a nontrivial task," and that he'd like to stay in touch if we're going to be testing BrailleBlaster's epub support once it's ready. I didn't have the heart to say my contract is up in a week, and plus I want to encourage them, so we left that vague.

Kieth's explanation of how BrailleBlaster handles nimas files did sound promising. He said when it comes to an image of an equation it would let the person type what the image says, then replace the image with MathML. If they fix it up so it can import epub files and do the same thing, that sounds efficient to me. I.E., hope lives on.

Re: Steve: producing Understanding Physics

Posted: Wed Mar 28, 2018 9:03 am
by steve.murgaski
Another interesting utility I've heard about recently is one which converts LaTeX to Nemeth braille, appropriately called latex2nemeth. It can be downloaded here: https://ctan.org/pkg/latex2nemeth?lang=en Its output can then be opened in LibreOffice, provided a plugin is installed. At the moment I don't have a book in LaTeX, but should one become available that could be another option worth pursuing.

Re: Steve: producing Understanding Physics

Posted: Wed Mar 28, 2018 9:16 am
by ka.li
I looked at latex a while ago and I found this resource to be helpful with learning latex and all sorts of other STEM subjects.
http://access2science.com/indexAccessibility.html

Re: Steve: producing Understanding Physics

Posted: Tue Apr 03, 2018 9:14 am
by ka.li
Many of the CSUN presentations are posted online and one of them is using Braille Blaster to create an accessible science textbook.
https://github.com/jamalmazrui/CSUNATC1 ... in-Braille

Re: Steve: producing Understanding Physics

Posted: Fri Apr 06, 2018 10:26 am
by jennlortie
Thank you so much for these resources, Ka! :)