A computer-science major, Amanda Lacy was ready to drop her physics class at Austin Community College. Because she’s blind, she listens to a digital textbook on her computer or uses an electronic Braille display. But she couldn’t understand symbols, diagrams and graphs, until a professor came to her aid, ultimately designing an online tutorial for blind physics students, reports the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Lacy showed the digital textbook to Richard Baldwin, her computer-science professor.
“There are many symbols that the computer doesn’t recognize,” Ms. Lacy said, “so it just comes out as gibberish.” For example, Ms. Lacy said in an interview, the computer will read ‘X squared’ simply as ‘X2′.
Baldwin spent several hours each week explaining the graphics to Lacy, sometimes by drawing them on her hand. As they worked together, he began creating an open-access online tutorial for blind students learning physics.
In Mr. Baldwin’s tutorials, equations are written using only symbols found on keyboards so that everything is one-dimensional and presented in a format that blind people can read. Using the tutorials, Ms. Lacy excelled in her physics class and received an A in the course.
Learning that blind people can’t draw accurately, Baldwin also created software to help Lacy do sketches for physics assignments. She plans to use the software in her Physics II course.
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[...] A computer-science major at a community college in Texas, Amanda Lacy was ready to drop her physics class. Because she’s blind, she listens to a digital textbook on her computer or uses an electronic Braille display. But she couldn’t understand symbols, diagrams and graphs, until a professor came to her aid, ultimately designing an online tutorial and drawing software for blind physics students. [...]