Math Textbooks for the Monarch

APH Products Monarch
1

So, I am one of the Rise participants. I work at a community college, and I spent the weekend scouring the OER textbooks online to find some I could read and study on the Monarch. I wanted to duplicate the experience of a freshman trying to master basic college math, and now with all the open educational resources out there, it should be possible.

I ran in to several barriers. Many math textbooks are not that accessible. There are hundreds on bookshare but the equations and formulas are images. And there are lots of charts, graphs and diagrams.

Nowadays many blind students – at least the ones I run across are so fully mainstreamed that in middle and high school they may see a TVI once a week if they are lucky. Struggling with and often failing pre-algebra is quite common and they come to us unprepared. I, as an early experiment in mainstreaming never got the chance to fail math, because they did not know how to teach it to me.

Of course, we can now use AI to describe images, and that indeed is helpful. And I ran across a few online textbooks with Math-ML, which JAWS can read. But trying to pull them up on the Monarch wasn’t fun.

At the end of this post I’ve provided links to the first section of the first chapter in several of these books; the first one is pretty accessible.

However these are long links, and for the life of me, I couldn’t get them pulled up on the Monarch.

There is no way I found to cut and paste between apps. So I could pull up a text file with links in Keyword, select and copy the link but I couldn’t paste it in to the internet browser.

Next I tried emailing myself a link, but there seems no way to “click” on it. Maybe I’m missing something, but this seems to be a real problem, no way to activate a link that isn’t on a web page.

The second problem was that I am not clear if Ecosia can render Math-ML. I wish I had some Math-ML in epub format I could try with Victor Reader.

NLS does have a few books on BARD with basic math, but they are formatted for 40-character lines. One that looks promising “Hot X, Algebra Exposed” perfectly for teams unfortunately uses UEB math and not Nemeth and I only know nemeth.

Because the Monarch has been touted as the solution to mastering high school and college math, and because you can do your homework in KeyWord and calculate expressions and graph them in KeyMath, it’s my hope that APH will simply include some OER materials on the Monarch. It has plenty of RAM and anything licensed under Creative Commons can be shared.

Think about the blind student with a less than accessible textbook. With a Monarch and a few OER textbooks already loaded on it, they would be able to independently master subjects that were giving them trouble. Chemistry, all the sciences, Stem materials in general are the hardest, but with its tactile graphics ability, the Monarch could solve this problem of blind students and STEM. But the first thing that needs to be done to add value to the Monarch is to have accessible, and freely available textbooks.

Here are the links to the starting sections of several Math OER textbooks. Perhaps I can log in to the Hive on my Monarch and grab them from this post.

OER Algebra
Chapter 1.1 for PCC

Chapter 1.1 for Open Stax

Another openstax book, chapter 1.1

LibreTexts

Flexibook

https://www.ck12.org/user:bwf0ac5jb2fjac5wyxjrzxjaz21hawwuy29t/book/mth070-elementary-algebra/section/1.1/

Math and Society, here’s front matter

2

I have confirmed that if you have a handout or an exam in Word, where the formulas and equations are created with the Word equation editor, you can indeed read the math accurately in KeyWord. I have several of these, and in JAWS, you pull up the Math viewer to read them also.

I am still struggling to get actual links in to the Monarch because the cut and paste between applications isn’t working for me; so perhaps I’ll ask support. However, I’ve figured out what OER textbooks are actually using Math-ML, using JAWS to read them, so the next step is to try them on the Monarch. Maybe ecosia won’t know Math-ML; that’s what I’m trying to discover.

I also have part of a calculus book that was rendered in Word with the equation editor and it too reads fine in Keyword. I couldn’t figure out though how to switch between two documents, one to read the book/handout/exams and another to type my answers. Nothing in the user guide about this, but that would be an essential skill to master if one is doing actual homework or taking an exam with the device. This would make a great Hive training.

I also had some math books in epub format but for every one, the formulas and equations were shown as a file with an EPS extension. I know EPS has something to do with postscript, but I’m not sure exactly what those images are, and anyway, neither AI on my PC nor the Monarch could open them within Victor reader or the tactile viewer.

Bookshare books with images also often say “formula removed” or display the image in the JAWS FS reader where AI can describe them, but I’ve found nothing from bookshare that uses actual Math-ML.

I think it would be great to have a hive training where the user opens a book in Victor reader, is able to read the math, and do some exercises in Keycalc and move effortlessly between the book, the calculator and writing their answers in Keyword. I seem to have the Monarch crash as I explore this, and maybe I’m the problem!

3

Hi Deborah!

OER textbooks in an accessible format available for use on the Monarch would be awesome.

Regarding the online pages as they are now constituted, I explored the links that you sent and this is what I discovered: Using Ecosia on the Monarch to open them does not work well, as the math is inaccessible. I am not sure why. However, when I connected the Monarch to a laptop and ran it with JAWS as a Braille Terminal, I had a better experience. The math rendered in Nemeth correctly, though it was not always accurately formatted. The graphics had some alt-text description but no apparent tactile graphic component. Navigating through the main text body was not difficult, but trying to use the buttons to open practice exercises was challenging because the information in the text regions where the questions, answers, and explanations were located did not follow a logical path and my cursor became frequently lost or rerouted to the top of the page. There were links as you described that I could press Enter on to activate, but they led to search pages full of other links that were not useful; also, they are really only visible to JAWS and the Monarch. Visually, they are tiny pictures that don’t appear unless you know they are there and hover over them with the mouse.

So, I experienced some success but there were also some issues with the page design and some problems with access.

Jenny

4

Thanks for your report, this was also my experience with OER textbooks. I’ve found some others, but the results with JAWS and on the Monarch with Ecosia were the same.

I’m really hoping someone gets a grant to remediate and use an OER textbook that could be included with the Monarch and/or be free to all blind students struggling with basic math concepts. There would be a path for a blind student who wasn’t good at math but was industrious to have a self-study program that would lead to competency. And I’d for sure beta-test it.

I don’t think the active TVI folks on this forum realize how many blind students don’t have active support in high school and therefor do not finish college due to even modest math requirements to get a degree. I am one of them, and only hold a well-paid job due to my many other skills. Many of the students I spoke with had a TVI who visited only once a week if that, and teachers who didn’t know how to make math accessible. But with a good self-study course, This could be permanently solved for those eager to finish college.